Dr. Christian Valuch

Research focus

My past research mainly dealt with the interaction of memory and attention processes in healthy human participants. Memory can have a strong influence on attentional selection which is of functional importance. For example, this allows us to recognize a familiar visual scene from a novel perspective. It also enables us to understand movies, despite the many cuts they usually contain. Conversely, attention is the key to our (typically) excellent recognition memory for visual material. My previous research has shown that this attentional control in complex visual scenes is based on specific contents of visual memory.

Currently, I aim to go one step further and examine how visual attention and visual memory influence awareness of a stimulus. I also try to understand the role of bottom-up visual signal properties such as luminance contrast, stimulus size, motion, duration, spatial frequency and visual transients for visual processing with and without of awareness. I am also interested in how top-down influences such as expectations and attention could compensate for low stimulus strength in the presence of visual noise. I am particularly interested in the neural correlates of these processes in the human brain. For my research, I mainly use psychophysical experiments, eye tracking, and functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Courses

• B.Psy. 203: Research Project

• M.Psy. 206: Behavioral Neuroscience