Postdoc alert. Laura Corbit in Toronto is hiring! Seen at Pavlovian conference.

And some of the recent human data: doi.org/10.1016/j.ad...

Great to see @bradfield-neuro.bsky.social presenting recent work at Pavlovian conference in Sydney. Back-translation of our VMAC task and links to compulsivity in animals.

@jakeembrey.bsky.social nice shoutout in the final keynote of Prof Ben Newell. Conference due to end, what a blast! @expsyanz.bsky.social

Great talk by student Samantha Curtis from Macquarie Uni on how the Stroop interference effect can be eliminated by splitting the onset of the word and its colour. @expsyanz.bsky.social

Finally, the associative learning session! 🙌 @expsyanz.bsky.social

Full room for symposium 'Reasoning from the opinion of others' @scondes.bsky.social @expsyanz.bsky.social

But we constantly find such relationships, that seem to be important, even after controlling for demographic factors and without knowing much about the complex motivational factors that drive each individual. See an example from last year here: doi.org/10.1016/j.ad...

We look at some of the tasks that have been used in the last 10 years to measure attentional disengagement and we examine whether they are any good at isolating this specific attentional process. Spoiler alert:lots of them are not great. We walk through exactly why, with lots of examples and images.

We talk a lot about motivationally-relevant stimuli capturing attention, but initial fixation is only one piece of the story. Attention needs to then disengage and shift away to be able to focus on the next relevant piece of information.

New paper in Cognition and Emotion with Daniel Pearson and @mikelepelley.bsky.social! We focus on best practice for measuring attentional disengagement - we hope it will be a useful reference for all attention researchers, and those interested in the role of attentional processes in psychopathology.