Research Interests: My research program studies the moment-to-moment ebbs and flows and fluctuations in cognitive processes over time to better understand the temporal dynamics of human cognition. By bridging together behavioural, psychophysiological, computational, and neuroimaging methods, I have studied temporal dynamics within attentional processes to uncover aspects of internal attention, social attention, and embedded attention. Over the years, my work has revealed that seemingly random variations in attentional patterns over time are in fact quite predictable and highly specific to each individual, advancing our fundamental understanding of the intrinsic and internal regularities that govern individual behaviour.
Selected Publications:
- Drody, A. C., Pereira, E. J., & Smilek, D. (2023). A desire for distraction: Uncovering the rates of media multitasking during online research studies. Scientific Reports, 13, 781. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-27606-3
- Pereira, E. J., Birmingham, E., & Ristic, J. (2022). Social attention as a general mechanism? Demonstrating the influence of stimulus content factors on social attentional biasing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 48(4), 289–311. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000984
- Pereira, E. J., Gurguryan, L., & Ristic, J. (2020). Trait-level variability in attention modulates mind wandering and academic achievement. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 909. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00909
- Pereira, E. J. & Castelhano, M. S. (2019). Attentional Capture is Contingent on Scene Region: Using Surface Guidance Framework to Explore Attentional Mechanisms during Search. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(4), 1273–1281. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-019-01610-z
- Hayward, D. A.*, Pereira, E. J.*, Otto, A. R., & Ristic, J. (2017; co-first authors). Smile! Social reward drives attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 44(2), 206–214. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000459
- Pereira, E. J. & Castelhano, M. S. (2014). Peripheral Guidance in Scenes: The Interaction of Scene Context and Object Content. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 40, 2056–2072. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037524
Personal Website: https://effiejpereira.github.io/