I’m Elisa. I’m a recent graduate of the Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience program at Michigan State University in East Lansing, MI, where I worked in the Timing, Attention, and Perception (TAP) lab (http://psychology.msu.edu/TAPlab/) with Dr. Devin McAuley. I earned my Ph.D. in Psychology in 2016 from MSU and received my B.A. in Physics from New York University in 2006.
Broadly, my research interests include attention and time perception. I was partially motivated to study how the mind processes temporal information by my studies in Physics: time as a physical quantity is very different from time as a psychological construct. Why is that we don’t perceive time like atomic clocks, and how does that help us to attend optimally to our environment? A flexible timing mechanism in the brain enables us to be responsive to the temporal structure of the environment – for instance, different rhythms in music, different paces of conversation, or different tempos of movement influence our feeling of time-in-passing and affect how we pay attention to the events around us.
If you’d like to ask me any questions about my work, please use the contact form below.
