Emma Ferneyhough

Post-Doctoral Fellow

I am broadly interested in how emotional salience modulates attention and visual perception. More recently, my interests have included examining the relationship of individual differences in anxiety with costs of emotion to attention. As a new member of Sonia’s lab, I will contribute to investigations of the neural mechanisms underlying attentional control in the presence of threat, and how patterns of activity change due to normal variation in anxiety across the population.

After receiving my bachelor’s degree in cognitive science from UC Berkeley, I worked in Frank Tong’s lab where I first learned about the neuroscience of visual perception. From there I went on to complete my graduate studies at NYU where I worked with Elizabeth Phelps and Marisa Carrasco on projects investigating emotion’s interaction with attention. I have used visual psychophysics to measure how the low-level perceptual ability of contrast sensitivity is both improved and impaired by attention cued with fearful and neutral faces. I have also used fMRI and patient methodology to investigate the neural correlates of emotional costs to attention.

Publications:

Ferneyhough, E., Stanley, D.A., Phelps, E.A., & Carrasco, M. (2010). Cueing effects of faces are dependent on handedness and visual field. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 17:529-535.
Meng, M., Ferneyhough, E., & Tong, F. (2007). Dynamics of perceptual filling-in of visual phantoms revealed by binocular rivalry. Journal of Vision, 7(13):8, 1-15.

E-mail: emmafern-at-nyu.edu

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