About Me
I have worked throughout my career to synthesize people's reports of their experience with objective performance measures like eye tracking and behavioral fluency. As I finish my doctoral degree, I hope to distill what I have learned into an informed approach for understanding how people learn in the real world.
Recent Work
Adams, Ruthruff, & Gaspelin (2022)
Adams, Ruthruff, & Gaspelin (2022)
Adams, Ruthruff, & Gaspelin (2022)
We showed that abrupt onsets (flashing lights) attracted more eye movements than color singletons (uniquely colored items), even when they were fully matched in their basic features.
Published in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics
Adams & Gaspelin (2021)
Adams, Ruthruff, & Gaspelin (2022)
Adams, Ruthruff, & Gaspelin (2022)
We showed that observers had some (imperfect) awareness of when their first eye movements traveled to task-irrelevant distractors.
Published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance
Adams & Gaspelin (2020)
Adams & Gaspelin (2020)
Adams & Gaspelin (2020)
We developed a new paradigm to show that observers were aware of performance impairments from task-irrelevant distractors.
Published in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics
(Awarded Best Article of The Year!)
Adams et al. (2018)
Adams & Gaspelin (2020)
Adams & Gaspelin (2020)
We showed that splitting up content led to sustained and generalizable improvements in learning for hundreds of students.
Published in European Journal of Behavior Analysis
Learning in the Laboratory: My research interests
Which objects attract visual attention?
With my Ph.D advisor, Dr. Nicholas Gaspelin, I found that dynamic items like flashing lights and motion have a greater inherent power to attract eye movements than static items like uniquely colored shapes. This has key implications for the design of visual warning signals.
Are we aware of visual distraction?
Dr. Gaspelin and I also explored observers' awareness of visual distraction (performance impairments by and eye movements to task-irrelevant distractors). We found that observers were somewhat aware of visual distraction, but only when asked immediately after it occurred.