Assistant Professor of Psychology

Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience

Office: 534 Wilson Hall
Phone: (615) 322-4595
Fax: (615) 343-8449
Email: 

Personal Website

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Degrees

• Ph.D., Harvard University, 2000

Research Area

• Seiffert studies how people see and direct their attention to moving objects. The ability to follow the movement of objects is an important skill to all animals for avoiding contact with predators or coinciding actions with prey. For people, expertise at tracking is vital for many activities, from sports like basketball and football to driving a car through a busy intersection. Although a great deal is known about the limits of tracking in terms of visual input and motor outputs, the central component of this ability remains unknown. How does attention follow object movement? What is the neural implementation of this process? Why do errors in tracking occur? How is attention used in the active manipulation of moving objects? The long-term objective is to understand how visual attention interacts with motion perception and visuo-motor systems to track the motion of target objects. The methods of investigation in the Seiffert lab include human psychophysics, traditional cognitive experiments, human neuroimaging (fMRI) and brain stimulation (TMS). Grant funding from the National Eye Institute of the National Institutes of Health supports this work.

Representative Publications

• Fehd, H. & Seiffert, A. E. (2010). Looking at the center of the targets helps multiple object tracking. Journal of Vision.
• Dewey, J., Seiffert, A. E. & Carr, T. (2010) Taking Credit for Success: The Phenomenology of Control in a Goal-Directed Task. Consciousness & Cognition. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2009.09.007
• Ko, P. C. & Seiffert, A. E. (2009). Updating objects in visual short-term memory is feature selective. Memory & Cognition, 37, 909-923.
• Tombu, M. & Seiffert, A. E. (2008). Attentional costs in multiple-object tracking. Cognition, 108(1), 1-25.
• Fehd, H. M. & Seiffert, A. E. (2008). Eye movements during multiple object tracking: Where do participants look? Cognition, 108(1), 201-209.
• Sohn, W. Y. & Seiffert, A. E. (2006). Motion aftereffects specific to surface depth order: Beyond binocular disparity. Journal of Vision, 6(2), 119-131.
• Seiffert, A. E., Somers, D., Dale, A. & Tootell, R. (2003). Functional MRI studies of human visual motion perception: Texture, luminance, attention, and after-effects. Cerebral Cortex, 13, 340-349.
• Ashida, H., Seiffert, A. E., & Osaka, N. (2001). Inefficient visual search for second-order motion. Journal of Optical Society of America A, 18, 2255-2266.
• Seiffert, A. E., & Cavanagh, P. (1999). Position-based motion perception for color and texture stimuli: Effects of contrast and speed. Vision Research, 39, 4172-4185.
• Somers, D., Dale, A., Seiffert, A. E., & Tootell, R. (1999). Functional MRI reveals spatially specific attentional modulation in human primary visual cortex. PNAS, 96(4), 1663-8.
• Holcombe, A. O., Macknik, S. L., Intriligator, J., Seiffert, A. E., & Tse, P. U. (1999). Wakes and spokes: New motion-induced brightness illusions. Perception, 28, 2131-1242.
• Seiffert, A. E., & Cavanagh, P. (1998). Position displacement, not velocity, is the cue to motion detection of second-order patterns. Vision Research, 38, 3569-3582.