Daniel Levin

Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies

Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience

Office: 321 Hobbs
Phone: 615-322-1518
Fax: 615-343-9494
Email:

Laboratory Website

Curriculum Vitae

Degrees

Ph.D. (Cornell University, 1997)

Research Area

Cognitive Studies

Current Research

Research in our lab is focused on the interface between concepts and visual perception. To this end we have been exploring the social concepts associated with a vareity of object categories, and the knowledge that drives visual selection in scene perception. In the former line of research we have been using basic psychophysical paradigms (including visual search and categorical perception) to understand the interface between cognition and perception for face categories (e.g. races) and broad ontological categories (e.g. living and nonliving things). In the latter line of research we have been exploring the phenomenon of change blindness, with a special emphasis on visual cognition in naturalistic settings. In addition, we have been doing research on visual metacognition that explores the large gap between people's optimism that they can detect visual changes and the reality of their poor performance. This final line of research is currently funded by an NSF grant to explore the implications of these misconceptions in legal settings.
Currently, our lab includes Alex Varakin (grad student), Jim Arrington (research assistant), Jennifer Bai (undergrad RA), and Ashley Dameron (undergrad RA). Recent grad student alumni include Bonnie Angelone, Melissa Beck, Yukari Takarae, and Joe Wayand.

Current Positions

Associate Professor of Psychology, Peabody College, Director of Graduate Studies, Psychology and Human Development.

Representative Publications

Simons, D.J., & Levin, D.T. (1997). Change Blindness. Trends in Cognitive Science, 1, 261-267.
Levin, D.T., & Simons, D.J. (1997). Failure to detect changes to attended objects in motion pictures. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 4, 501-506.
Simons, D.J., & Levin, D.T. (1998). Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 5, 644-649.
Keil, F.C., Levin, D.T., Richman, B.A., & Gutheil, G. (1999). Mechanism and explanation in the development of biological thought: The case of disease. In Medin, D.L., & Atran, S. (Eds.), Folkbiology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Levin, D.T., & Beale, J. (2000). Categorical perception occurs in newly learned faces, cross-race faces, and inverted faces. Perception and Psychophysics, 62, 386-401.
Levin, D.T., Momen, N., Drivdahl, S.B., & Simons, D.J. (2000). Change blindness blindness: The metacognitive error of overestimating change-detection ability. Visual Cognition, 7, 397-412.
Levin, D.T. (2000). Race as a visual feature: Using visual search and perceptual discrimination tasks to understand face categories and the cross-race recognition deficit. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 559-574.
Levin, D.T., & Simons, D.J. (2000). Fragmentation and continuity in motion pictures and the real world. Media Psychology, 2, 357-380.
Takarae, Y., & Levin, D.T. (2001). Animals and artifacts may not be treated equally: Differentiating strong and weak forms of category specific visual agnosia. Brain and Cognition, 45, 249-264.
Levin, D.T., Takarae, Y., Miner, A., & Keil, F.C. (2001). Efficient visual search by category: Specifying the features that mark the difference between artifacts and animals in preattentive vision. Perception and Psychophysics , 63, 676-697.
Simons, D. J., Chabris, C. F., Schnur, T. T., & Levin, D. T. (2002). Evidence for preserved representations in change blindness. Consciousness and Cognition, 11, 78-97.
Levin, D.T. (2002). Change blindness blindness as visual metacognition. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9, 111-130.
Levin, D.T., Simons, D.J., Angelone, B.L., & Chabris, C.F. (2002). Memory for centrally attended changing objects in an incidental real-world change detection paradigm. British Journal of Psychology, 93, 289-302.
Beck, M.R., & Levin, D.T. (2003). The role of representational volatility in recognizing pre- and postchange objects. Perception and Psychophysics, 65, 458-468.
Angelone, B.L., Levin, D.T., & Simons, D.J. (2003). The roles of representation and comparison failures in change blindness. Perception. 32, 947-962.
Levin, D.T., & Beck, M.R. (2004). Thinking about seeing: Spanning the difference between metacognitive failure and success. In D.T. Levin (Ed), Thinking and Seeing: Visual Metacognition in Adults and Children. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Levin, D.T., & Varakin, D.A. (in press). No pause for a brief disruption: Failures to detect interruptions to ongoing events.
Beck, M.R., Angelone, B.L., & Levin, D.T. (in press). Using knowledge about the probability of change to guide visual attention.

Biography

I received my BA from Reed College in 1990, and my PhD at Cornell University in 1997, then moved to a faculty position Kent State University. Starting in 2003 I moved here to Vanderbilt where I am an Associate Professor of Psychology and Human Development.