Portfolio

A selection of interactive tools and online experiments from my research on attentional control and the exploitation–exploration tradeoff.

Interactive Demo

Attentional Decision Making

An interactive Hugging Face Space visualizing the value-based decision model of attentional control. Explore how response speed and reward context jointly govern whether attention is directed internally or toward the environment. Built with R and Shiny.

Computational Modeling of Attention

Computational Attention Model

Check out the development of the computational model of rational attentional decision-making between a primary rewarding task and checking on hidden states that would incur losses if left unchecked here.

OSF Pre-Registrations

Rational Attention & Environment–Memory Orientation

Does distraction make you slow, or does being slow make you distracted?

The foundational pre-registration for the rational cue-fixation model. In a time-limited task-switching paradigm, participants must decide each trial whether to check an external task cue or rely on memory - trading off certainty against the time cost of checking. Tests whether cue-checking follows rational decision-making principles.

Can distractibility be adaptive? Examining the effect of reaction times on attentional orientation

Follow-up pre-registration testing whether slowing primary task response times (via a trackpad motor manipulation) increases cue-checking rates - replicating the age-related pattern within younger adults and ruling out parallel-processing confounds from perceptual difficulty manipulations.

Does slowing the rate of exploitation increase orientation to the environment?

Extends the cue-checking series by manipulating response rate through inter-trial intervals (ITI) rather than stimulus or motor difficulty, ensuring cue checks cannot occur in parallel with the primary task.

Older adults rely more on the environment - due to age differences in discrimination or bias?

Uses signal-detection theory to disentangle whether older adults’ greater reliance on environmental cues reflects a general bias toward bottom-up input or a reduced ability to discriminate contexts in which external information is adaptive.

Does decision-making guide attentional capture?

Tests whether attentional capture can be suppressed when it is financially costly, addressing a gap in the literature where capture has only been studied in consequence-free contexts. Asks whether people exert rational control over capture when benefits outweigh control costs.

Are reward effects in attentional capture contingent on feedback?

Follow-up to the capture study above. An initial analysis revealed that reward-modulated capture only appeared when feedback about distractor inspections was available. This pre-registration tests whether feedback is a necessary condition for value-driven modulation of attentional capture.

Stability–Flexibility Tradeoffs

Analysis Code — Multilevel Stability–Flexibility Project

R analysis scripts and models for the three-level stability/flexibility tradeoff project. Includes experimental, within-subject, and individual differences analyses testing whether cognitive control exhibits a fundamental tradeoff between stability and flexibility. Check out a rendered html version of the analysis here and here.

Multilevel Test of Stability–Flexibility Tradeoffs

Pre-registration for the first level of analysis in a multi-level project on stability/flexibility tradeoffs. Tests whether experimental manipulations of prior and current trial control demands interact with task-switching costs in a manner consistent with a tradeoff model.

Individual Differences Test of Stability–Flexibility Tradeoffs

Third-level pre-registration testing whether individual differences in stability/efficiency and flexibility measures are consistent with the tradeoff model, building on the experimental and within-subject analyses from the earlier levels.

Online Experiments

Most of my experiments were run in person - see the three exceptions below, each hosted on Pavlovia.

Beaches - Visual Search & Reward

A Prolific-compatible task hosted on Pavlovia. It efficiently measures similarity ratings between many stimuli. Inspired by Hebart et al., 2020.

Slow Search - Speed & Exploration

A visual search experiment probing whether response slowing shifts attention from exploitation to exploration and to which degree humans can exhibit rational attentional behavior. The task manipulates response speed to test whether slower participants show greater reliance on external, action-relevant information.

Slow Math - Arithmetic & Attention

This experiment is similar to “Slow Search” but manipulates response speed by including easy vs. difficult math problems.