{"id":4861,"date":"2025-10-06T08:48:23","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T12:48:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.trincoll.edu\/reporter\/?page_id=4861"},"modified":"2025-10-06T08:48:23","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T12:48:23","slug":"published-work","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.trincoll.edu\/reporter\/fall-2025\/along-the-walk\/published-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Published Work"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/srep\/\"><em>Scientific Reports<\/em><\/a>, published by\u00a0Nature\u00a0Portfolio<em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Their research focuses on an automatic form of spatial attention. \u201cIf your phone is sitting on the desk and the screen lights up, you\u2019ll automatically notice it,\u201d Grubb said.<\/p>\n<p>The paper,\u00a0\u201cA preliminary investigation of the interaction between expectation and the reflexive allocation of covert spatial attention,\u201d\u00a0was co-authored by Grubb, Nicholas Crotty \u201924, M\u201925, Nicole Massa \u201923, Dagoberto Tellez \u201925, and Alex L. White, a professor at Barnard College.<\/p>\n<p>As the introduction to the paper explains, \u201cImagine 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\u2014a phenomenon dubbed covert exogenous spatial attention.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Crotty, who completed the\u00a0five-year bachelor\u2019s\/master\u2019s neuroscience program\u00a0at Trinity, said, \u201cWhat 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\u2019re looking at the interaction between attention and learning with this specific form of attention.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Grubb added, \u201cWhat we found is that when information flashes when it\u2019s unlikely\u2014no expectation of something happening in the periphery\u2014the allocation of attention is stronger than when you\u2019re in an environment when something is expected to happen.\u201d Trinity students explore phenomena like this in Grubb\u2019s courses, which focus on perception and the psychology of attention.<\/p>\n<p>A grant to Grubb from the National Science Foundation has supported this project. \u201cPart 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,\u201d Grubb said. \u201cFor me, it\u2019s nice to see the students building a competitive CV.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Header Image: Associate Professor of Psychology Michael Grubb, Alenka Doyle \u201926, Kamilla Volkova \u201926, and Nicholas Crotty \u201924, M\u201925 in Trinity\u2019s Attention, Perception, Decision Laboratory in 2023. Photo by Nick Caito<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u00a0Scientific Reports, published by\u00a0Nature\u00a0Portfolio. Their research focuses on an automatic form of spatial attention. \u201cIf your phone is sitting on the desk and the screen lights up, you\u2019ll automatically notice it,\u201d [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":0,"parent":4669,"menu_order":14,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4861","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.5 (Yoast SEO v25.8) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Published Work - The Trinity Reporter<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.trincoll.edu\/reporter\/fall-2025\/along-the-walk\/published-work\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Published Work\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Associate Professor of Psychology Michael A. 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