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Beck, Diane
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Beckman Institute, Cognitive Neuroscience
Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley
Research Areas
Cognitive neuroscience, visual cognition, and attention and visual perception
Diane Beck's research program is aimed at identifying the cognitive processes and neural structures that enable and limit our visual representations of the world. Despite the fact that our brains register visual information in parallel across the visual field, our visual experience of the world is surprisingly more limited. We have all experienced the difficulty of finding a face in the crowd, or being so engrossed in our own thoughts that we have completely failed to "see" someone we are looking right at. Beck and her lab are interested in why we experience these limitations. Specifically, they ask what processes determine whether or not we are aware of a visual object or event; what mechanisms constrain the number of items we can effectively process at the same time; and how higher-level processes, such as attention, modulate activity in visual cortex. Beck and her lab use a variety of approaches and methods to address these questions, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), behavioral methods, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
Representative Publications
Beck, D. M. & Kastner, S. (2008). Top-down and bottom-up mechanisms in biasing competition in the human brain. Vision Research [Epub ahead of print]
Torralbo, A. & Beck, D. M. (2008) Perceptual load-induced selection as a result of local competitive interactions in visual cortex. Psychological Science, 19, 1045-1050.
Beck, D. M.; Kastner, S., Stimulus similarity modulates competitive interactions in human visual cortex. Journal of Vision 2007, 7, (2).
Palmer, S. E.; Beck, D. M. The repetition discrimination task: An objective method for studying perceptual grouping. Perception & Psychophysics 2007, 69, (1), 68-78.
Beck DM, Muggleton N, Walsh V, and Lavie N. 2006. Right parietal cortex plays a critical role in change blindness. Cerebral Cortex 16(5):712-717.
Beck DM, and Kastner S. 2005. Stimulus context modulates competition in human extrastriate cortex. Nature Neuroscience 8:1110-1116.
Beck DM, and Lavie N. 2005. Look here but ignore what you see: effects of distractors at fixation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 31:592-607.
Kastner S, and Beck DM. 2005. Biasing competition in human visual cortex. [L. Itti, G. Rees, and J. Tsotsos, eds.] Neurobiology of Attention, San Diego: Elsevier.
Beck DM, and Palmer SE. 2002. Top-Down influences on Perceptual Grouping. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 28:1071-1084.
Additional Information
Related Research (By Area):
Cognitive Neuroscience
Sensory and Motor Systems
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