I have conducted research on the assessment and treatment of female offenders, but am currently interested in applying aspects of cognitive psychology (how humans process and store information) to the design of effective learning environments.
Selected Publications
Atkinson, J.L (2018). Correctional Assessment and Treatment: Toward Community Reintegration, Chapter 6 in J. Barker and D.S. Tavcer (Eds.). Women and the Criminal Justice System: A Canadian Perspective. 2nd ed. Toronto, ON: Edmond Montgomery.
Folsom, J. and Atkinson, J.L. (2007) The Generalizability of the LSI-R and the CAT to the Prediction of Recidivism in Female Offenders. Criminal Justice and Behaviour, 34(8), 1044-1056.
Atkinson, J.L. (1996). Female sex offenders: A literature review. Forum on CorrectionsResearch, 8(2), 39-42.
Atkinson, J.L. (1995). The Assessment of Female Sex Offenders. Kingston, ON: Correctional Service of Canada, April, 1995.
Atkinson, J.L. and McLean, H. (1994). Women and fraud: Results of a program at the Prison for Women. Forum on Corrections Research, 6(1), 39-41.
Since I am now retired, I regret I am no longer accepting post-doctoral fellows, graduate students or undergraduate students (theses, directed lab, etc.). For further inquiries, please contact me by email.
Research Interests
In our laboratory we are interested in the perceptual, cognitive, and emotional processes involved in music appreciation and understanding. Recent work has focused on individual differences in musical and prosodic skills and sensitivities. We study such topics as absolute pitch, tone deafness, effects of music lessons on nonmusical cognitive skills, musical dyslexia, aging and music, amusia following stroke, and sparing of musical memories in Alzheimer's Disease.
Conversation is one of our most common and highly skilled activities. When we talk with other people, we perceive and produce a remarkable amount of social, emotional and linguistic information. This information is conveyed visually through the movements of our face and body and acoustically through our voice. In my laboratory, we study the perceptual and cognitive activities that make conversation possible. We use a variety of experimental techniques such as eye tracking, motion capture, animation and psychophysics to explore the multisensory processes and brain structures that are involved in face-to-face communication.
Selected Publications
Latif, N., Alsius, A., & Munhall, K.G. (2018). Knowing when to respond: the role of visual information in conversational turn exchanges. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 80, 27-41.
Mitsuya, T., Munhall, K.G., & Purcell, D.W. (2017). Modulation of auditory-motor learning in response to formant perturbation as a function of delayed auditory feedback. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 141, 2758-2767.
Latif, N., Barbosa, A.V., Vatikiotis-Bateson, E., Castelhano, M.S. and Munhall, K.G. (2014). Movement coordination during conversation. PloS One, 9(8), e105036.
MacDonald, E.N., Johnson, E.K., Forsythe, J., Plante, P., Munhall, K.G. (2012). Children’s development of self-regulation in speech production. Current Biology, 24:22(2), 113-7.
My research focuses on understanding the dynamics of attention, which captures how this vital process ebbs and flows and fluctuates over time. Prioritizing attentional dynamics in this manner allows us to (i) account for the rich flexibility we see in attention across our everyday lives, (ii) grasp why patterns of attention can result in behaviour that is both adaptive and maladaptive, and (iii) highlight the unique individual factors that make your attention different from mine. To address these questions, I use behavioural experiments (e.g., attentional tasks, experience sampling, collaborative activities), psychophysiological methods (e.g., eye tracking, EEG, fMRI), and computational approaches (e.g., nonlinear analyses, machine learning) to study attentional dynamics in social situations, across internal thoughts, and within digital environments.
Selected Publications
Attentional Dynamics in Social Situations
Pereira, E. J., Birmingham, E., & Ristic, J. (2022). Social attention as a general mechanism? Demonstrating the influence of stimulus content factors on social attentional biasing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 48(4), 289–311.
Pereira, E. J., Birmingham, E., & Ristic, J. (2019). The eyes do not have it after all? Attention is not automatically biased towards faces and eyes. Psychological Research, 84(5), 1407–1423.
Hayward, D. A.*, Pereira, E. J.*, Otto, A. R., & Ristic, J. (2017). Smile! Social reward drives attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 44(2), 206–214 (* equal contribution to the manuscript).
Attentional Dynamics across Internal Thoughts
Pereira, E. J.*, Ayers-Glassey, S.*, Wammes, J. D., & Smilek, D. (2023). Attention in hindsight: Using stimulated recall to capture dynamic fluctuations in attentional engagement. Behavior Research Methods, 1-32 (* equal contribution to the manuscript).
Pereira, E. J., Gurguryan, L., & Ristic, J. (2020). Trait-level variability in attention modulates mind wandering and academic achievement. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 909.
Attentional Dynamics within Digital Environments
Drody, A. C.*, Pereira, E. J.*, & Smilek, D. (2023). The importance of accounting for off-task behaviours during data collection. Nature Human Behavior, 7, 1234–1236 (* equal contribution to the manuscript).
Drody, A. C., Pereira, E. J., & Smilek, D. (2023). A desire for distraction: Uncovering the rates of media multitasking during online research studies. Scientific Reports, 13, 781.
Name Pronunciation Guide: "mah-ni-caw ca-ste-LAW-no"
Click below to hear pronunciation
Research Interests
My primary research interests are in the visual attention and visual memory and how they function in our everyday lives. In the lab, we are currently studying these processes as they relate to real-world scenes. Across various studies we investigate how people perceive, explore, search through and remember information from complex, natural stimuli (i.e., real-world scenes). Using both behavioural and eye movement measures, we are interested in how we initially understand what we are viewing, how this then affects how we pay attention to our environment and then how this information is remembered over the long-term.
Selected Publications
Castelhano M.S. & KrzyÅ›, K. (2020). Rethinking Space: An overview of perception, attention and memory in scenes. Annual Review of Vision Science, in press.
Pereira, E.J. & Castelhano, M.S. & (2019). Attentional Capture is Contingent on Scene Region: Using Surface Guidance Framework to Explore Attentional Mechanisms during Search. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(4), 1273-1281.
Castelhano, M.S., Fernandes, S., & Theriault, J. (2019). Examining the Hierarchical Nature of Scene Representations in Memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 45(9):1619–1633.
Castelhano, M.S. & Witherspoon, R.L. (2016). How you use it matters: Object Function Guides Attention during Visual Search in Scenes. Psychological Science, 27(5), 606-621.
Pereira, E.J. & Castelhano, M.S. (2014) Peripheral guidance in scenes: The interaction of scene context and object content. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 40(5),2056-2072.
Castelhano, M.S. & Heaven, C. (2011). Scene Context influences without Scene Gist: Eye movements Guided by Spatial Associations in Visual Search. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18(5), 890-896.
My research aims to identify key risk and resilience factors that contribute to the socioemotional well-being of adolescents and families. From the dynamic systems and biopsychosocial perspectives, I examine developmental implications of the flexibility in adolescents’ biobehavioral emotion regulation and parent-adolescent psychophysiological coordination. Currently, in collaboration with Dr. Tom Hollenstein, I am interested in integrating these individual and dyadic regulatory processes at multiple time scales (e.g., moment to moment, day to day, year to year) to better understand how development occurs in relational contexts.
