crest

John M. Henderson

city
     

john

Professor
Visual Cognition Laboratory
Visual Cognition Research Group
Psychology Department
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
The University of Edinburgh
 

Research Topics:

  • Visual attention
  • Eye movements in visual cognition and reading
  • Scene recognition, representation, and memory
  • Dynamic scene perception
  • Language and the vision-language interface

Editor, Visual Cognition

journal picture

 

How is information about the visual world acquired, identified, retained in memory, and manipulated by the cognitive system to support thought and to guide behavior? My research program involves understanding the representations and processes associated with visual selective attention (both covert and overt), scene recognition, visual short- and long-term memory, and the interaction of cognition and perception. I have secondary interests in psycholinguistics and the integration of vision and language. I use eyetracking as a primary method, but I also use fMRI and ERP to investigate how these processes are implemented in the human brain. Two general themes guide my research: vision as an active process, and vision in naturalistic scenes. Visit the Dynamic Images and Eye Movements (DIEM) Project, currently funded by Leverhulme Trust and ESRC.

Publications here. Lab and research here. People in the lab here. Eyetracking facilities here. Public engagement here.

Lab research appeared on the BBC ONE science programme Bang! Goes the Theory on September 28, 2009. About 15 minutes were devoted to explaning our research and interviewing lab members. The story was also picked up and reported in several newspapers and on BBC Radio Scotland. Press from our earlier study of attention during the Obama inauguration can be found here.


Associated Staff Member, Doctoral Training Centre in Neuroinformatics and Computational Neuroscience, Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation; Member, Human Communication Research Centre; Associate Member, School of Informatics.


Representative Publications:

Nuthmann, A., Smith, T. J., Engbert, R., & Henderson, J. M. (in press). CRISP: A computational model of fixation durations in scene viewing. Psychological Review.

Rayner, K., Smith, T. J., Malcolm, G. L., & Henderson, J. M. (2009). Eye movements and visual encoding during scene perception. Psychological Science, 20, 6-10.

Castelhano, M. S., & Henderson, J. M. (2008). The influence of color on the activation of scene gist. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 34, 660-675.

Henderson, J. M. (2007). Regarding scenes. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 219-222.

Henderson, J. M., Larson, C. L., & Zhu, D. C. (2007). Cortical activation to indoor versus outdoor scenes: An fMRI study. Experimental Brain Research, 179, 75-84.

Torralba, A., Oliva, A., Castelhano, M. S., & Henderson, J. M. (2006). Contextual guidance of eye movements and attention in real-world scenes: The role of global features in object search. Psychological Review, 113, 766-786.

Henderson, J. M. (2003). Human gaze control during real-world scene perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 498-504.

Henderson, J. M., & Hollingworth, A. (2003). Global transsaccadic change blindness during scene perception. Psychological Science, 14, 493-497.

Hollingworth, A., & Henderson, J. M. (2002). Accurate visual memory for previously attended objects in natural scenes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 28, 113-136.

Full Publication List

 

Teaching: I've taught or co-taught a variety of courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels: Introductory Psychology, Perception, Cognitive Psychology, Visual Attention, Seminar in Cognitive Science, The Visual Cognition of Natural Scenes, Shallow and Incomplete Representations in Vision and Language.

PhD Supervision: I am first supervisor for George Malcolm, Konstatinos Tsagkararidis, David Acunzo (Informatics), and Andrew Stewart (Informatics); and second supervisor for Jens Apel, Antimo Buonocore, Moreno Coco (Informatics), Liz Irvine (Philosophy), and Sneh Jaswal. Helene Keysar recently completed her PhD.

I encourage students interested in pursuing post-graduate (MSc or PhD) or post-doctoral research on these topics to contact me at any time.


Books:

Journal and Chapter Publications: Please note that the pdfs are for personal research use only. Any other use is prohibited.