Postdoctoral Researcher
aaron.hoffman@mail.utexas.edu
512.565.8132
The Universityof Texas at Austin
1 University Station A8000
Austin, Texas 78712-0187
Research
My research concerns how people attend to and acquire world knowledge. How do we direct our attention to different aspects in our environment to facilitate learning? With all that can distract us from the task at hand (e.g., cell phones, email, the barking from our neighbor's dog), how do we control the information that enters our minds and that which gets filtered out? Although current psychological theories describe how human learning includes knowing how to discern useful from distracting information, my research has tried to discover the factors that lead to such attentional decisions. My hope is that this line of research can ultimately lead to developing tools and technqiues that will allow us to learn better and faster in our fast paced and demanding world.
My most current project concerns how we time our attention. If we consider the observation that we not only have to decide what to look at but when, we realize that the timing of our attention is as important as its locus. For example, when watching for traffic as we cross the street we know not just what to look for but also how quickly the situtation can change from one moment to the next, and such knowledge is crucial to our survival.
To answer such questions my work combines eye and mouse movement tracking to assess attentional deployment, a variety of performance measures that can assess learning, and computational modeling. So far my work has applied these questions and methods to the healthy, young adult populations of university undergraduates, but my findings should be equally applicable and potentially informative for clinical populations.
My research concerns how people attend to and acquire world knowledge. How do we direct our attention to different aspects in our environment to facilitate learning? With all that can distract us from the task at hand (e.g., cell phones, email, the barking from our neighbor's dog), how do we control the information that enters our minds and that which gets filtered out? Although current psychological theories describe how human learning includes knowing how to discern useful from distracting information, my research has tried to discover the factors that lead to such attentional decisions. My hope is that this line of research can ultimately lead to developing tools and technqiues that will allow us to learn better and faster in our fast paced and demanding world.
My most current project concerns how we time our attention. If we consider the observation that we not only have to decide what to look at but when, we realize that the timing of our attention is as important as its locus. For example, when watching for traffic as we cross the street we know not just what to look for but also how quickly the situtation can change from one moment to the next, and such knowledge is crucial to our survival.
To answer such questions my work combines eye and mouse movement tracking to assess attentional deployment, a variety of performance measures that can assess learning, and computational modeling. So far my work has applied these questions and methods to the healthy, young adult populations of university undergraduates, but my findings should be equally applicable and potentially informative for clinical populations.
Select Publications
Rehder, B., Colner, R. M., Hoffman, A. B. (in press). Feature Inference Learning and Eyetracking. Journal of Memory and Language.
Hoffman, A. B., Harris, H. D., & Murphy, G. L. (2008). Prior knowledge enhances the category dimensionality effect. Memory & Cognition, 36, 256-270.
Bott, L., Murphy, G.L., & Hoffman, A.B. (2007). Blocking in category learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136, 685-699.
Hoffman, A. B., & Murphy, G. L. (2006). Category dimensionality and feature knowledge: When more features are learned as easily as fewer. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 32, 301-315.
Rehder, B., & Hoffman, A. B. (2005). Thirty-something categorization results explained: Selective attention, eyetracking, and models of category learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 31, 811-829.
Rehder, B., & Hoffman, A. B. (2005). Eyetracking and selective attention in category learning, Cognitive Psychology, 51, 1-41.
Links
Pages: My New York University Page
People: Brad Love, Art Markman, Gregory L. Murphy, Bob Rehder