ABOUT AMLAB

Our lab, led by Dr. Benchi Wang, who earned his PhD in 2019 in Amsterdam and is currently a tenured associate professor at South China Normal University, is well-supported by multiple national grants, providing ample resources for research within our designated topics. Our diverse team consists of members who share a keen interest in cognition and its neural mechanisms. They are not only friendly but also enthusiastic about engaging in discussions on any related questions.

Research Interests:

I) Attentional Selection

In our daily lives, we navigate a visually complex world filled with a wealth of perceptual information. Recognising our inability to process all this information simultaneously, we must selectively direct our limited cognitive resources toward a subset of relevant items closely tied to our current behavior—referred to as attentional selection.

Attentional selection can be conceptualized as being controlled in three main ways (Awh, Belopolsky, & Theeuwes, 2012; Theeuwes, 2018, 2019): top-down control, bottom-up control, and selection history. For instance, consider the scenario of working in an office on a science paper. Goal-driven selection involves top-down control, while a distraction like someone knocking on the door represents stimulus-driven selection with bottom-up control. If a colleague persistently knocks on the door for amusement, your ability to suppress the distraction and refocus on your work involves history-driven selection, shaped by previous selection episodes.

Our primary interest lies in understanding how these factors interact to shape the selection priority map, influencing current selection processes.

II) Memory

Working memory (WM) is commonly viewed as an online memory system that not only provides temporary storage but also manipulates information essential for ongoing complex cognitive tasks, such as learning and reasoning. Traditionally, WM's storage capacity has been considered limited, accommodating around ~4 items at a time.

Given the crucial role of this memory system in various cognitive tasks, our research aims to unravel how it operates, explore methods to enhance its capacity, investigate ways to manipulate memory representations, and examine its relationship with our long-term memory system.