Daniel Weissman investigates the psychological mechanisms that underlie attention and cognitive control. These include the mechanisms that enable minimizing distraction from irrelevant stimuli, paying attention in different sensory modalities, avoiding attentional capture by salient stimuli, multi-tasking (e.g., task switching), and attending to/learning statistical regularities in the environment. He uses methods from cognitive psychology to investigate these mechanisms.

For example, one of Dr. Weissman’s interests concerns the mechanisms that enable adaptive control, which is the ability to change behavior in response to recent events. In laboratory tasks involving attention (e.g., the Stroop task), for instance, people are often less distracted by irrelevant stimuli (a) right after they overcome distraction from such stimuli and (b) when irrelevant stimuli are usually highly distracting over periods of minutes. These effects suggest a prominent role for memory (of recent events) in guiding attention, which is an active area of research in my laboratory. These effects also suggest that minimizing distraction from irrelevant stimuli involves adaptive control mechanisms that promote a “distraction-resistant” state at both short (e.g., trial-by-trial) and long (e.g., minutes) timescales, which we also investigate.