Published Work
Associate Professor of Psychology Michael A. Grubb and some of his students recently published a paper about spatial attention; the piece appeared in the journal Scientific Reports, published by Nature Portfolio.
Their research focuses on an automatic form of spatial attention. “If your phone is sitting on the desk and the screen lights up, you’ll automatically notice it,” Grubb said.
The paper, “A preliminary investigation of the interaction between expectation and the reflexive allocation of covert spatial attention,” was co-authored by Grubb, Nicholas Crotty ’24, M’25, Nicole Massa ’23, Dagoberto Tellez ’25, and Alex L. White, a professor at Barnard College.
As the introduction to the paper explains, “Imagine reading an intriguing scientific paper, a fresh cup of coffee percolating on the desk, when suddenly, a text notification appears in the upper-right-hand side of your computer screen. Despite a deep interest in the paper, your attention is automatically pulled towards the alert without your eyes leaving the middle of the screen. In everyday life, the visual system is bombarded by stimuli that induce such reflexive, spatially specific shifts of attention without accompanying eye movements—a phenomenon dubbed covert exogenous spatial attention.”
Crotty, who completed the five-year bachelor’s/master’s neuroscience program at Trinity, said, “What we put our attention on determines what we learn, and then what we learn kind of affects how we direct our attention. In this case, we’re looking at the interaction between attention and learning with this specific form of attention.”
Grubb added, “What we found is that when information flashes when it’s unlikely—no expectation of something happening in the periphery—the allocation of attention is stronger than when you’re in an environment when something is expected to happen.” Trinity students explore phenomena like this in Grubb’s courses, which focus on perception and the psychology of attention.
A grant to Grubb from the National Science Foundation has supported this project. “Part of what the NSF cares about is training opportunities and working with students to bring them into the scientific communities, and giving them the skills to have successful careers,” Grubb said. “For me, it’s nice to see the students building a competitive CV.”
Header Image: Associate Professor of Psychology Michael Grubb, Alenka Doyle ’26, Kamilla Volkova ’26, and Nicholas Crotty ’24, M’25 in Trinity’s Attention, Perception, Decision Laboratory in 2023. Photo by Nick Caito
