Woodman, Geoff, Department of Psychology

Geoffrey F. Woodman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology
111 21st Ave. South
502 Wilson Hall
615-322-0049 (office)
geoff.woodman@vanderbilt.edu

The goal of much of the research in the Woodman Lab is to understand the interactions between attention and memory by recording event-related potentials noninvasively from the scalps of participants in addition to collecting behavioral responses while observers perform tasks that are similar to simple video games.  Many of the experiments in the lab study cognitive processing during two types of tasks. One is visual search, a task like looking for your keys on the ground. The second type are memory tasks, typically remembered a set of objects for a very short period. We use these simple tasks to understand how we learn to attend to certain objects in our environment and how we learn to store certain things in memory.

When we process information in these tasks, such as remembering events or objects, our brains generate very small electrical potentials that can be recorded with sensors placed near the scalp. Analyses of event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked by specific stimuli or cognitive operations have been crucial in the study of perception, memory, attention, language comprehension and production, decision-making, cognitive control, sleep states, and many clinical disorders.

For more information, please visit the lab website.