Trafton Drew
Education
B.A. 2002, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; M.S., Ph.D. 2009, University of Oregon; Postdoctoral Fellow 2010-2014, Brigham & Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School
RESEARCH:
Attention, working memory, medical image perception, EEG, ERPs, Eye-tracking
Dr. Drew studies the real-world consequences and neural underpinnings of the limitations of the human attention and working memory systems. My lab uses EEG and eye-tracking to understand how we hold information in a memory during challenging cognitive tasks. We study the processes that underlie the ability to manipulate information being held in memory, or actively attended. This work ties in with an interest in understanding the differences and similarities between holding information in memory and actively attending to visual information. We are also studying possibility that advanced eye-tracking methodology may be used to improve performance on complex visual search tasks, like searching for dangerous items in baggage screening, or a cancer in a chest radiograph.