Dr Elizabeth Michael
College Research Associate, Director of Studies in Psychology
SpecialisationCognitive Neuroscience/Visual Perception
Research interestsMy research focuses on the brain-wide interactions that allow us to make difficult perceptual judgements, like discriminating between very similar objects, or finding a target in a cluttered environment.
It is often assumed that brain regions play a fixed or continuous role in perception, but an emerging view suggests that this is not the case - the role played by any given brain region is strongly influenced by our level of experience with a particular task. In my future research, I will study how the contribution of different brain regions to making these kinds of difficult judgement change as we become more experienced with the task. For example, when we are trying to detect a target in a cluttered environment, we might first heavily rely on brain regions that help us to ignore distracting information, until our visual system becomes robust enough to withstand this interference.
It is often assumed that brain regions play a fixed or continuous role in perception, but an emerging view suggests that this is not the case - the role played by any given brain region is strongly influenced by our level of experience with a particular task. In my future research, I will study how the contribution of different brain regions to making these kinds of difficult judgement change as we become more experienced with the task. For example, when we are trying to detect a target in a cluttered environment, we might first heavily rely on brain regions that help us to ignore distracting information, until our visual system becomes robust enough to withstand this interference.
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