I am a first-year graduate student in Cognition & Perception at New York University. I use psychophysical tests on human subjects -- and perhaps neuroimaging in the near future -- to study visual perception.
Before coming to New York, I studied cognitive science at Yale University (with Dr. Brian Scholl and Dr. Laurie Santos) and I spent a year studying vision at the University of Sydney with Dr. Alex Holcombe.
Research
The scientific questions I am most interested in concern the emergence of our daily visual experience from neural activity in the brain. What happens between retinal stimulation and awareness? How do top-down cognitive processes select some of that retinal input for processing? Is the visual information used to guide and time actions the same as that which we 'see'?
I started doing research on visual cognition with monkeys at the Yale Comparative Cognition Lab and with human infants at the Univ. of Colorado Cognitive Development Center. After that, I transitioned to human subjects and studied 'inattentional blindess' with Professor Brian Scholl at the Yale Perception & Cognition Lab.
On a Fulbright Scholarship to the University of Sydney, Australia, I worked with Dr. Alex Holcombe and Dr. Daniel Linares. We used psychophysical techniques to measure the effect of stimulus intenisty on perceptual delays and on visuomotor timing. A stimulus with lower intensity takes more time to reach your awareness, and accordingly, dimmer moving objects appear to lag behind where they would appear if they were brighter. Nonetheless, actions meant to be synchronized with the moment a moving object arrives at a stationary landmark are not delayed when the object is dimmer, at least within the daytime range of luminance.
Now at NYU I am beginning to study feature-based attention and to learn neuroimaging techniques.
Publications
Papers:
Linares, D., Holcombe, A.O. & White, A.L. (in press). Where is the moving object now? Reports of instantaneous position show poor temporal precision (σ = 70 ms). Journal of Vision. (preprint)
White, A.L., Linares, D. & Holcombe, A.O. (2008). Visuomotor timing compensates for changes in perceptual latency. Current Biology, 18, R951 - R953 (pdf)
Conference presentations:
White, A. Linares, D. & Holcombe, A. Visuomotor compensation for variation in perceptual latency. Presented at the annual meeting of the Vision Sciences Society, May 2009, Naples, Florida.
Linares, D., White, A., & Holcombe, A. Object localization at speeds below and above
the attentive tracking limit. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Vision Sciences
Society, May 2008, Naples, Florida.
White, A. & Scholl, B. (2007). Inattentional Blindness, Object Persistence, and Foveal
Inhibition. Poster presented at the
annual meeting of the Vision Sciences Society, May 2007, Sarasota, Florida.
Contact
alex.white at nyu.edu
Photography
The following photographs were made in Colorado with a 4x5 large-format camera.
And this one was taken in New Haven, CT.
