Naseem Al-Aidroos

About

I use behavioural measures, eye tracking, EEG/ERP and fMRI to study visual attention, perception, and memory. If you are interested in joining the lab, or want to learn more about the research I do, please see the website for my research lab (linked above).

Prospecitve graduate students: We are looking for bright, enthusiastic graduate students to join the lab in Fall 2025. If you are interested, you should apply to the NACS graduate program offered by our department.

Prospective undergraduate students: Please see instructions on my lab website about how to "Join the Lab", and options for completing experiential learning opportunities.

Education

• Post doc: Princeton University (2011)
• PhD: University of Toronto (2010)
• BMath: University of Waterloo (2004)

Research

Our mental and physical behaviours are only as good as the information they are based on. Research at the VCN lab is concerned with understanding how attention tunes information processing within our minds and brains so that, more often than not, our behaviour is guided by good information. Broadly speaking, we are interested in how attention operates, how it can be optimized, and under what situations it fails.

Much prior research has focused on dissociating attention into distinct components or abilities (e.g., the ability to attend to different aspects of sensory information or memory, and the ability to control attention in a top-down or bottom-up manner). Research at the VCN lab complements this prior work on what attention can do, by focusing on how these abilities are achieved. That is, our approach lies in identifying the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie attention. This mechanistic level of description is of particular relevance for understanding both why attention sometimes fails (e.g., in certain populations) and how to overcome these failures. To investigate the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie attention, we employ a range of converging measures, including behaviour (reaction time, accuracy, limb tracking, and eye tracking), pupilometry, electroencephalography (EEG/ERP), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Publications

A complete list of publications is available on my lab website (linked above). Here are my five most recent publications (last updated August 2023; student collaborators in bold):

• Plater, L., Giammarco, M., Joubran, S., & Al-AIdroos, N. (in press). Control over attentional capture within 170 ms by long-term memory control settings: Evidence from the N2pc. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
• Plater, L., Nyman, S., Joubran, S., & Al-Aidroos, N. (2022). Repetition enhances the effects of activated long-term memory. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 17470218221095755.
• Plater, L., Dube, B., Giammarco, M., Donaldson, K., Miller, K., & Al-Aidroos, N. (2022). Revisiting the role of visual working memory in attentional control settings. Visual Cognition, 1-21.
• Al-Aidroos, N. (2021). Dividing attentional capture. Visual Cognition, 29(9), 592-595.
• Giammarco, M., Plater, L., Hryciw, J., & Al-Aidroos, N. (2021). Getting it right from the start: Attentional control settings without a history of target selection. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 83(1), 133-141.

Teaching

I have taught a number of courses at the University of Guelph.

• Introductory Research Methods (PSYC*2360)
• Sensation and Perception (PSYC*2390)
• Cognitive Psychology (PSYC*2650)
• Cogntive Neuroscience (PSYC*3270 and PSYC*4600)
• Special Topics in Behavioural Sciences: Visual Cognition (PSYC*4580)
• Advanced Topics in Bahavioural and Cognitive Neuroscience (PSYC*4470)
• ​Graduate Statistiscs and Research Methods (PSYC*6940)
• The weekly NACS Speaker Series (PSYC*6740/60)