SIU Psychologist to Speak on Models of Perception, Memory and Attention

Matthew Schlesinger of the Southern Illinois University Department of Psychology will give a colloquium at 2 p.m. Friday, Nov. 7, in DeGarmo Hall room 48. 

Schlesinger's colloquium is titled "Doing more with less:  Salience-based models of perception, memory, and attention."  It is presented by the Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences Sequence, the Department of Psychology, and the Sage Fund.  Admission is free and open to the public.   

According to Schlesinger, one of the places that psychology, neuroscience and computational models converge is in the phenomenon of visual salience.  In the talk, he argues that salience-based models are constructive - not reductionist - and provide a versatile platform for how we think about and study perception, memory and attention.  As an illustration, Schlesinger describes how a salience-based model can be used to simulate the development of visual selective attention in young infants.

Schlesinger's research interests are in visual attention and spatial working memory.  Several current research studies are investigating how infants, children and adults use both memory and visual skill to guide their attention across space and time.  He also studies how people divide their attention while working on two or more simultaneous tasks.  This work is complemented by a number of computer models that simulate eye-movement activity in real time.