Psychology Faculty Profiles
Steven Franconeri, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Cognitive Psychology
Office: Swift 317
Phone: (847)467-1259
E-mail: franconeri@northwestern.edu
Research Interests
The world presents our visual system with an overwhelmingly rich image. We cannot fully process everything at once, and instead must focus our attention on the most relevant information. My research focuses on the tools that we use to select visual information, and how these tools are applied. How much of selection is automatic, and how much is under our control? Can we select more than one thing at a time? How do we maintain selection of an object when it moves?
I also study processes that support and interact with visual selection. These processes include visual memory, which helps us store what we have selected in the past, object tracking, which helps us maintain selection of moving objects, and number perception, which relies on selection mechanisms to construct the units underlying the counting process.
Selected Publications
Choo, H. & Franconeri, S.L. (in press). Objects with reduced visibility still contribute to size averaging. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.
Hollingworth, A. & Franconeri, S. L. (in press). Object correspondence is established on the basis of both spatiotemporal and surface feature cues. Cognition.
Franconeri, S. L., Bemis, D. K., & Alvarez, G. A. (in press). Rapid number estimation is based on a segmented visual scene. Cognition.
Guzman-Martinez, E., Leung, P., Franconeri, S. L., Grabowecky, M., & Suzuki, S. (in press). Rapid eye-fixation training without eye tracking. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
Franconeri, S. L., Lin, J. Y., Pylyshyn, Z. W, Fisher, B. F. , & Enns, J. T. (2008). Evidence against a speed limit in multiple object tracking. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 15(4), 802-808.
Lin, J., Franconeri, S. L., & Enns, J. T. (2008). Objects on a collision path with the observer demand attention. Psychological Science 19(7), 686-692.
Franconeri, S. L., Alvarez, G. A., & Enns, J. T. (2007) How many locations can you select? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance 33(5), 1003-1012.
Franconeri, S. L., Hollingworth, A., & Simons, D. J. (2005). Do new objects capture attention? Psychological Science, 16(4), 275-281.
