Background

I earned my BA (Hons) in Psychology at Brock University in 2012, and my MSc and PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Guelph in 2019. After a four-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Ohio State University (2019-2023), I joined the Psychology faculty at Memorial University of Newfoundland in August of 2023.

Research Interests

The environments that we live in contain far more visual detail than our brains can process. Nevertheless, we are able to navigate through these environments with relative ease. How is it that we form meaningful representations of our world from the limited information that our brains can extract?

My research focuses on visual cognition (visual attention, visual short-term memory, and visual perception), and the cognitive mechanisms that allow us to prioritize the elements of our environments that are most relevant to our behavioural goals, like finding a friend in a crowd or changing lanes while driving on a busy street. My research program has centered on understanding how these mechanisms work together to promote efficient behaviour through flexible, reciprocal interactions, and the cognitive filters that support the networks they create. I’m especially interested in understanding how these mechanisms combat particularly salient and/or unexpected visual information, like a sudden flashing billboard while you’re trying to change lanes on the highway. Billboards are explicitly designed to capture your attention, but what are the cognitive consequences of this type of distraction, and how might they affect behaviour?

Representative Publications

Dube, B., *Pidaparthi, L., & Golomb, J. D. (2022). Visual distraction disrupts category-tuned attentional filters in ventral visual cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 34(8), 1521-1533.

Dube, B., and Golomb, J. D. (2021). Perceptual distraction causes visual memory intrusions. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 28, 1592-1600.

Dube, B., & Al-Aidroos, N. (2019). Distinct prioritization of visual working memory representations for search and for recall. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 81(5), 1253-1261.

Dube, B., *Lumsden, A., & Al-Aidroos, N. (2018). Probabilistic retro-cues do not determine state in visual working memory. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(2), 641-646.

Dube, B., Emrich, S.M., & Al-Aidroos, N. (2017). More than a filter: Feature-based attention regulates the distribution of visual working memory resources. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 43(10), 1843-1854.