Neuroscience Seminar: September 15, 2025
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"Attending to What Matters: Neural Mechanisms of Distractor Suppression"
 | Speaker: Date: Monday, September 15, 2025, 4 p.m. Location: |
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*Zoom option available
Description
In everyday life, we often encounter salient stimuli such as brightly colored objects that have been designed to distract us. We must use mechanisms of attention to ignore salient distractions and focus on stimuli that are relevant to our immediate goals. In psychology, there has been much debate about the nature of cognitive control over attention to prevent distraction. The current talk will discuss evidence for a theory of distraction called the signal suppression account. According to this account, salient stimuli generate an “attend-to-me” signal which automatically attracts attention. However, this salience signal can be actively suppressed to prevent distraction. This account has been widely supported by converging evidence from studies of perception, eye movements, and event-related potentials (ERPs). I will review some of this evidence and also explain new directions for this theory in terms of learned control of attention.
Speaker Bio
Nicholas Gaspelin received his Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico in Psychology, and completed his postdoctoral research at the University of California. Currently, Dr. Gaspelin is an Associate Professor, teaching courses in Individual Study in Psychology, Perception, and the Attention & Distraction Seminar. Dr. Gaspelin's research focuses on cognitive control, eye movements, cognitive neuroscience with the goal to understand the cognitive neuroscience underlying attention in humans. These topics are studies via experiments using cognitive tasks to measure behavior, eye movements, and event-related potentials (ERPs). His research is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
About the Neuroscience Seminar Series
The goal of the NextGen Precision Health Neuroscience Science Seminar is to highlight transdisciplinary precision research taking place in the field, provide opportunities for collaboration among researchers to build their own research efforts and promote clinical/researcher activity across the University of Missouri System and our partners.
For questions about this event, please reach out to Mackenzie Lynch at lynchmm@health.missouri.edu.