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Name Pronunciation Guide:
"EF-ee puh-RARE-ah"

Click below to hear pronunciation

B.A.H., Queen’s University, 2008
M.Sc., Ñý¼§Ö±²¥, 2014
Ph.D.,  McGill University, 2020

Curriculum Vitae

Research Interests

My research focuses on understanding the dynamics of attention, which captures how this vital process ebbs and flows and fluctuates over time. Prioritizing attentional dynamics in this manner allows us to (i) account for the rich flexibility we see in attention across our everyday lives, (ii) grasp why patterns of attention can result in behaviour that is both adaptive and maladaptive, and (iii) highlight the unique individual factors that make your attention different from mine. To address these questions, I use behavioural experiments (e.g., attentional tasks, experience sampling, collaborative activities), psychophysiological methods (e.g., eye tracking, EEG, fMRI), and computational approaches (e.g., nonlinear analyses, machine learning) to study attentional dynamics in social situations, across internal thoughts, and within digital environments.

Selected Publications

Attentional Dynamics in Social Situations

Pereira, E. J., Birmingham, E., & Ristic, J. (2022). Social attention as a general mechanism? Demonstrating the influence of stimulus content factors on social attentional biasing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 48(4), 289–311.

Pereira, E. J., Birmingham, E., & Ristic, J. (2019). The eyes do not have it after all? Attention is not automatically biased towards faces and eyes. Psychological Research, 84(5), 1407–1423.

Hayward, D. A.*, Pereira, E. J.*, Otto, A. R., & Ristic, J. (2017). Smile! Social reward drives attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 44(2), 206–214 (* equal contribution to the manuscript).

Attentional Dynamics across Internal Thoughts

Pereira, E. J.*, Ayers-Glassey, S.*, Wammes, J. D., & Smilek, D. (2023). Attention in hindsight: Using stimulated recall to capture dynamic fluctuations in attentional engagement. Behavior Research Methods, 1-32 (* equal contribution to the manuscript).

Pereira, E. J., Gurguryan, L., & Ristic, J. (2020). Trait-level variability in attention modulates mind wandering and academic achievement. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 909.

Attentional Dynamics within Digital Environments

Drody, A. C.*, Pereira, E. J.*, & Smilek, D. (2023). The importance of accounting for off-task behaviours during data collection. Nature Human Behavior, 7, 1234–1236 (* equal contribution to the manuscript).

Drody, A. C., Pereira, E. J., & Smilek, D. (2023). A desire for distraction: Uncovering the rates of media multitasking during online research studies. Scientific Reports, 13, 781.

B.Sc., University of Toronto, 2000
M.A., Michigan State University, 2002
Ph.D., Michigan State University, 2005

Curriculum Vitae [PDF]

Name Pronunciation Guide:
"mah-ni-caw ca-ste-LAW-no"

Click below to hear pronunciation

Research Interests

My primary research interests are in the visual attention and visual memory and how they function in our everyday lives. In the lab, we are currently studying these processes as they relate to real-world scenes. Across various studies we investigate how people perceive, explore, search through and remember information from complex, natural stimuli (i.e., real-world scenes). Using both behavioural and eye movement measures, we are interested in how we initially understand what we are viewing, how this then affects how we pay attention to our environment and then how this information is remembered over the long-term.

Selected Publications

Castelhano M.S. & KrzyÅ›, K. (2020). Rethinking Space: An overview of perception, attention and memory in scenes. Annual Review of Vision Science, in press.

Pereira, E.J. & Castelhano, M.S. & (2019). Attentional Capture is Contingent on Scene Region: Using Surface Guidance Framework to Explore Attentional Mechanisms during Search. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(4), 1273-1281.

Castelhano, M.S., Fernandes, S., & Theriault, J. (2019). Examining the Hierarchical Nature of Scene Representations in Memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 45(9):1619–1633.

Castelhano, M.S. & Witherspoon, R.L. (2016). How you use it matters: Object Function Guides Attention during Visual Search in Scenes. Psychological Science, 27(5), 606-621.

Pereira, E.J. & Castelhano, M.S. (2014) Peripheral guidance in scenes: The interaction of scene context and object content. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 40(5),2056-2072.

Castelhano, M.S. & Heaven, C. (2011). Scene Context influences without Scene Gist: Eye movements Guided by Spatial Associations in Visual Search. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18(5), 890-896.