Center for Visual and Cognitive Neuroscience Faculty

Dr. Balas studies the properties and development of high-level vision, specifically face and object recognition.

Before joining the CVCN, Dr. Balas received his PhD from MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and was a post-doctoral fellow at Children's Hospital Boston. Dr. Balas has studied the ways that infants perceive faces and object learning, and has published work relating to texture and scene perception, the effects of categorization on object learning, and has ongoing projects related to social perception in early childhood and adulthood.

The Balas Lab conducts psychophysical and electrophysiological research directed at describing object recognition and learning in children and adults. Lab Page »

Dr. Blakeslee's research focuses on understanding human brightness and lightness perception primarily through the study of visual illusions. The goal is to reveal the neural mechanisms underlying these fundamental qualities of human vision.

Dr. Blakeslee earned her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara studying color vision in squirrels and primates using electrophysiological and behavioral techniques. After a post-doctoral foray into invertebrate visual physiology at the Australian National University she started publishing in the field of human brightness and lightness perception. Dr. Blakeslee has been in the Psychology Department at NDSU since 1991.

Current projects in Dr. Blakeslee's lab use visual psychophysics, computational modeling, and EEG to study the spatial and temporal characteristics of the neural mechanisms underlying brightness and lightness perception. Lab Page »

Dr. Conwell studies the various cues used by children as they learn their first language and how sensitivity to those cues changes during development.

Dr. Conwell received her Ph.D. from Brown University's Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Science in 2009 studying the interface between infant speech perception and grammatical development. After a post-doctoral stint in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, she joined the faculty at NDSU in January of 2011. Her work asks how children learn the grammar of their first language, specifically focusing on the cues to grammatical structure that are available in speech to children. She uses a range of techniques with both adults and pre-school aged children to assess the availability and efficacy of these cues during language learning and processing.

Ongoing projects include studies of the perceptual and neural disambiguation of apparent homophones, the representation and processing of language describing triadic interactions and the robustness of cue availability in spontaneous and elicited speech.

Conwell's research has been noted in the Fargo-Moorhead IN-FORUM.

Dr. Gordon researches the mental representations of objects and scenes, and the role that attention plays in developing those representations.

Graduating in 1999 with a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Robert has published several publications regarding scene perception and the role that attention plays in perceiving them. Dr. Gordon has also served as an associate professor for the department of psychology at NDSU since 2002.

Dr. Gordon's laboratory focuses on how humans are able to form a representation of a scene very quickly, and how the short-term representations of objects are developed as they are observed. Lab Page »

The overarching goal of Dr. Johnson's research program is to characterize the psychological and neural systems underlying visual attention and working memory and to identify how these systems are coordinated to promote stable, adaptive, visually-guided behavior.

Dr. Johnson earned his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Iowa, where he used electroencephalography (EEG), behavioral methods, and neural field modeling to capture the dynamic processes underlying visual attention, visual working memory, and change detection. As a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Johnson extended his range of expertise to include the use of simultaneous transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and spectral analysis of the EEG to explore the causal mechanisms underlying working memory.

Dr. Johnson will join the Department of Psychology at NDSU in the Summer of 2012. Research in his laboratory will focus on the use of combined TMS and EEG to clarify how coordinated causal interactions among distributed neural systems support cognition and behavior. Other projects will explore the role of cortical oscillations in working memory and attention, and the development and testing of computational models of these processes.

Dr. Langley researches the changes in patterns of cognitive functioning as they change through the aging process, with a focus in age-related changes in selective attention and visual search performance.

Dr. Langley has a Ph.D. in Cognitive and Biological Psychology from the University of Minnesota, and has taught with NDSU's Department of Psychology since 2002. Her publications focus on the effects of aging and Alzheimer's disease on attention and spatial cognition.

Current research projects examine how attention factors influence driving performance as individuals age, and training interventions that enhance older adults' attention skills with every day activities. Lab Page »

Dr. McCourt uses a variety of approaches to study how humans perceive brightness and lightness (including brightness illusions), allocate spatial attention, and combine visual and auditory information through multisensory integration.

Dr. McCourt earned his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1982. Arriving at NDSU in 1991, he was awarded the James A. Meier and Dale Hogoboom Professorships in 2004 and 2009, respectively. In 2004 he and a group of psychology colleagues successfully competed for a NIH/NCRR Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) grant which established the NSDSU Center for Visual and Cognitive Neuroscience, which he currently directs.

Using visual and auditory psychophysics, computational modeling, eye tracking, and EEG, Dr. McCourt studies the neural mechanisms of brightness and lightness perception, spatial attention, and the ways in which auditory and visual stimuli are perceptually integrated. Lab Page »

Dr. Nawrot studies and models brain mechanisms for depth and motion perception, eye movements, visual-vestibular interactions, and perceptual deficits due to stroke and ophthalmic disease. His goal is to understand how observers use visual information to generate a neural representation their personal view of a constantly changing three-dimensional world.

Graduating from Northwestern University in 1988 with an MS in Psychology and Vanderbilt University in 1991 with a Ph.D. in Psychology, Dr. Nawrot held a post-doctoral fellowship in Behavioral Neuroscience in the Neurology Department at the University of Iowa College of Medicine. Beyond the typical psychophysical techniques, Dr. Nawrot has employed a wide variety of behavioral techniques including include computerized eye and head movement tracking, alcohol intoxication, drug side-effects, and studies of patients with eye and vision disorders, brain damage, and Alzheimer's disease.

His current theoretical work deals with the role of the pursuit eye movement system in the perception of depth from motion parallax. Dr. Nawrot works with neurophysiologists, mathematicians, developmental psychologists, and ophthalmologists in a multidisciplinary approach to solving these problems. Lab Page »

Dr. Robinson studies cognition/affect relationships across a diversity of topic areas such as personality, self-regulation, automaticity, subjective well-being, and aggression.

Graduating from the University of California, Davis in 1996 with a Ph.D. in Social Psychology, Dr. Robinson has published studies in the Journal of Personality and the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Dr. Robinson's work takes place at the intersection of personality, social, and cognitive perspectives and generally concerns affective outcomes. A particular ongoing interest is the manner in which explicit and implicit components of personality interact with each other in predicting emotional experiences and behavior. Most of this work adopts a self-regulatory perspective.

Dr. Thomas' research examines the ways in which action influences cognition.

Before joining the Department of Psychology at NDSU in 2011, Dr. Thomas received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was a post-doctoral researcher at Vanderbilt University. She has published work pointing to a variety of links between actions and thoughts, showing that eye movements, arm movements, and shifts of the entire body influence problem solving, memory, and attention.

Current projects take an embodied cognition approach to the study of visual attention, examining the ways that our physical bodies influence the manner in which we sample information from the world. Lab Page »

Broadly speaking, my interest lie at the intersection between children's social cognitions, relational experiences, and psychological and emotional adjustment. More specifically, I am interested in: (a) how cognitive processes (e.g., attentional biases, relational schemas, self-perceptions) contribute to behavioral problems that underlie difficulties in forming positive relationships with peers, (b) how social cognitive biases resulting from problematic relational experiences contribute to adjustment problems, and (c) what contextual factors influence children's ability to form positive relationships with peers, their emotional well being, and their school adjustment. Most recently my lab and I conducted the Classroom Connections Project, a cross-sectional study of children's peer beliefs, self-esteem, social relationships, and perceptions of teacher's responses to negative interactions among students. I am currently conducting a two-year longitudinal study examining the family and classroom processes that deter/contribute to peer victimization among children and moderate the link between relational stressors and children's emotional and academic adjustment.

Dr. Woods studies perception and cognition in infants with an emphasis on the ability to process objects. Her research is focused on learning how infants begin to identify new forms of information as important and how development in multiple areas contributes to the emergence of early cognitive abilities.

Graduating from Texas A&M University with a Ph.D. in 2006 for her work on infants' use of color and luminance information to individuate objects, Dr. Woods has served as an assistant professor in the department of Human Development and Family Science at NDSU since 2008. She has published many studies focusing on infants' attention to visually-perceived object attributes that can be used to identify objects.

Dr. Woods' lab, the Infant Cognitive Development Lab, is dedicated to understanding the ways that infants learn and process information about toys and other objects. Her most recent studies have investigated ways in which parents and caregivers can better help infants learn. Lab Page »

Woods' research has been noted in the Fargo-Moorhead IN-FORUM.