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
Attention capture: Selection by visual reflex
As we switch among visual tasks, our visual system relies on a set of flexible tools to select information that is important to our current goals (for example, a driver is especially attuned to red objects, which are likely to be stop lights or brake lights). But some types of visual change (such as the sudden appearance of an animal) trigger a reflexive shift of attention regardless of our current goals, perhaps because such stimuli could signal an important change to the environment.
Franconeri, S. L., Alvarez, G. A., & Bemis, D. K. (under revision). It takes attention to capture attention.
Franconeri, S. L., & Simons, D. J. (2005). What dynamic signals capture attention: A reply to Abrams & Christ (2005). Perception & Psychophysics 67(6), 962-966. [pdf]
Franconeri, S. L., Hollingworth, A., & Simons, D. J. (2005). Do new objects capture attention? Psychological Science 16(4), 275-281. [pdf]
Franconeri, S. L., & Simons, D. J., & Junge, J. A. (2004). Searching for stimulus-driven shifts of attention. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 11(5), 876-881. [pdf]
Franconeri, S. L., & Simons, D. J. (2003). Moving and looming stimuli capture attention. Perception & Psychophysics 65(7), 999-1010. [pdf]
The architecture of visual selection
One major goal of our research program is to understand the core architecture of selection - what mechanisms are available for selecting information, what are their limits, and how are they designed to deal with problems presented by the natural world?
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.[pdf]
Alvarez, G. A., & Franconeri, S. L. (2007). How many objects can you track? Evidence for a resource-limited tracking mechanism. Journal of Vision 7(13), 1-10. [pdf] [New Scientist Article]
Bemis, D. K., Franconeri, S. L., & Alvarez, G. A. (under revision). Rapid enumeration is based on a segmented visual scene.
Visual short-term memory
As our attention shifts around a scene, we need visual short-term memory to know what we have already seen, to compare new information to old information, and to learn about new objects that we have not seen before. Our research also explores the limits and nature of this visual memory. Some of this research shows that observers miss salient changes to complex natural scenes, illustrating that visual information is not robustly stored unless it has been selected.
More recently our research has focused on uncovering the nature of these memory representations. Using controlled displays of simple shapes, this work explores the type of information that can be stored, the resolution at which it can be stored, and whether visual memory is limited by a fixed number of 'object slots', or whether memory capacity can be flexibly allocated across objects.
Franconeri, S. L., Simons, D. J., & Alvarez, G. A. (in preparation) Gone in 16 milliseconds: The capacity limit of visual memory is not due to decay over time.
Alvarez, G. A., & Franconeri, S. L. (under revision). The resolution of visual memory.
Alvarez, G. A. & Franconeri, S. L. (under revision). The allocation of visual short-term memory capacity: Evidence for a flexible storage mechanism.
Mitroff, S. R., Simons, D.J., & Franconeri, S.L. (2002). The siren song of implicit change detection. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. 28(4), 798-815. [pdf]
Simons, D. J., Franconeri, S. L., & Reimer, R. L. (2000). Change blindness in the absence of a visual disruption. Perception 29, 1143-1154. [pdf]
Simons, D. J., Mitroff, S. R., & Franconeri, S. L. (2003). Implicit and explicit representations in scene perception. In M. Peterson & G. Rhodes (Eds.), Analytic and holistic processes in the perception of faces, objects, and scenes. JAI/Ablex. [link]
