Jackson S. Colvett

Dr. Jackson Colvett is an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department. He completed a B.A. in Psychology at Wake Forest University before receiving a Ph.D in Psychological and Brain Sciences with a focus on Brain, Behavior, and Cognition at Washington University in St Louis. His research program primarily concerns the attentional control processes at the intersection of attention, learning, and memory. These processes allow us to achieve our goals and complete both simple and complex tasks by selecting goal-relevant information and filtering out goal-irrelevant distractors. His current research interests include how people learn that particular items or features of an environment predict high or low levels of distraction and subsequently use those features to adjust their attentional control. A related line of research asks which features dominate over others when there are multiple features in the environment predicting different levels of distraction (e.g., will people relax or focus their attention if a “high distraction” item feature appears in a “low distraction” location?)