A curious thing can happen when you stare at a regular gridlike pattern as in bathroom tiles or a piece of graph paper. What do you see? At a first pass, of course, you see the individual squares, but many people find that they can also ‘see’ more complex shapes and patterns beyond the squares themselves. We call this phenomenon ‘scaffolded attention’, inspired by how the grid of squares serves as the scaffold or raw material for our ‘imagination’. Across space and time, vision and audition, I am currently exploring the nature, scope, and prevalence of this phenomenon.
RESEARCH AT A GLANCE
The raw material of perception is intrinsically continuous — undifferentiated washes of light, sound, space, and time. In stark contrast, what we consciously experience are discrete individuals — objects and events.
How to create objects with your mind
How our perception of events connects with the rest of mental life
Our perceptual experiences are inherently dynamic — we experience discrete events. On the one hand, we explore the breadth of influence of event perception on our mental lives — including the surprising ways our perception of events might interact with other mental processes, from enumeration, time perception, causal perception, decision-making, and mental dysfunction (such as paranoia and rumination). On the other, we go in-depth into "how it works". In particular, when the statistics of our local environment dramatically change (as when we move from one event to the next), it may be adaptive to 'flush' our mental buffer of obsolete information to some degree (as one might clear a buffer in a computer program). In this line of work, we explore how beginnings, endings, and the hierarchy of experience interact with memory flushing in more nuanced ways than previously thought.