Effie J. Pereira

Effie J. Pereira

Assistant Professor

The Fragility of Social Attention Part Deux

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Published:

Chapter 2 of my dissertation is currently out in the open access journal Vision! In this chapter, I further probed what factors may be responsible in preferential and spontaneous attentional biasing towards faces and eyes, and investigated visual context through background scene information. It seems like seeing faces in embedded environments does in fact enhance more overt measures of social attentional biasing (i.e., when eyes are free to move).

We also found interesting dissociations between directly looking at faces with our eyes and covertly attending to them with our mind’s eye, indicating that we use these two processes very differently in our own social lives. That is, directly looking at faces and people may be used to explicitly convey our own internal thoughts and emotions to others, whereas covertly attending to them may be used to discreetly gather information around us without revealing our immediate intentions to others.

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I had a phenomenal time with CSPC Science Meets Parliament program last week, where brilliant researchers across Canada met with MPs & Senators on the Hill, bringing together the people generating knowledge in Canada with those who use it for the public good.





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I had a whirlwind of a week in Ottawa this past week, representing the University of Waterloo and Queen’s University, and meeting with MPs as part of the CSPC Science Meets Parliament program. The program brought together Tier 2 CRCs, Independent Indigenous Researchers, & Banting Postdoctoral Fellows to strengthen the connection between science & policy communities and learn about how scientific evidence is used for policy making in Parliament.





It was amazing to see the love for research and innovation at some of the highest levels of government, and I was thrilled to meet with Dr. Mona Nemer, Chief Science Advisor of Canada, Valerie Bradford, MP for Kitchener South-Hespeler, and numerous others. I cannot think of better people to champion the great scientific work we do here in Canada!









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