John McDonald completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia in 1999 and followed that with a postdoctoral fellowship at University of California San Diego with Dr. Steven Hillyard. He currently serves as Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience at Simon Fraser University. His team records the brain’s electrical activity while individuals perform a variety of attention-demanding tasks. McDonald has developed methods to isolate brain activity associated with attentional selection and suppression of potentially distracting stimuli. This enables McDonald and his team to determine when an individual (or group) is keeping their attention on a task, and when they divert their attention to irrelevant distractions.
McDonald is primarily interested in examining the attentive capabilities of healthy individuals, but his research may ultimately shed light on attentional disorders of the brain. He's written widely on visual, auditory, and spatial sensory perception, processing and attention. |
Director of HELDr. John J. McDonald
Email: jmcd at sfu.ca |
Graduate Students
Daniel Tay has a BSc (Hons) in behavioural neuroscience and an MA in cognitive & neural sciences from Simon Fraser University. He is currently a PhD student in the Human Electrophysiology Lab. By using noninvasive recordings of event-related brain potentials (ERPs), Daniel seeks to better understand the neuro-cognitive processes that enable healthy humans to search for objects in the visual environment. His research asks three related questions: What search strategies can we adopt when searching for items of interest? How do we search in the presence of irrelevant objects that compete for our attention? How do the various neural mechanisms involved in visual search predict cognitive, physiological, and behavioural differences across individuals?
Email: daniel_tay at sfu.ca Research Interests: visual search, visual attention, distraction, individual differences, nature of attention deficits, electroencephalography (EEG), event-related potentials (ERPs) |
David McIntyre is currently a Master's student in the Human Electrophysiology Lab. At Simon Fraser University, he completed a BA (Hons) Psychology and a Certificate in Philosophy and Methodology of Science. David has previously been involved in studies of visual working memory, naturalistic scene viewing (eye-tracking), and visual attention. He advocates for closer integration of biology and psychology.
Email: david_mcintyre at sfu.ca Research Interests: Neurodegenerative disorders (esp. dementias), biology of language, ERP analysis techniques |
Post-undergraduate Research Assistants
Honours Students
Alumni
Andrew Lowery completed his MA in the Human Electrophysiology Laboratory. He investigated the neural mechanisms underlying the Stroop effect. When not in the lab, he enjoys rock climbing at the local climbing gym.
Email: alowery at sfu.ca
Research Interests: EEG, ERPs, Stroop effect, concussion, visual attention, and emotion research
Email: alowery at sfu.ca
Research Interests: EEG, ERPs, Stroop effect, concussion, visual attention, and emotion research
Jennifer Hoffmeister completed her BSc with honours in behavioral neuroscience and minor in counselling and human development at SFU. Her honours project in HEL focused on using EEG to investigate the underlying effects that lead to the behavioural results within a modified spatial cueing paradigm. She is also fascinated by the effects of cognitive biases and impairments on attention. She recently completed her master's in social work at University of British Columbia.
Email: jhoffmei at sfu.ca
Research interests: EEG, visual attention, cognitive impairments, psychopathology
Email: jhoffmei at sfu.ca
Research interests: EEG, visual attention, cognitive impairments, psychopathology
Victoria Carriquiriborde completed her honours in psychology and minor in kinesiology at SFU. For her honours project, she investigated the inhibition-of-return effect under a simple cueing paradigm looking at specific event-related potentials. When not in the lab she enjoys sports (specially rugby), weightlifting, and outdoor activities. She is now a master's student at the Translational Neuroscience Lab at SFU with Dr. Brianne Kent.
Email: vcarriqu at sfu.ca
Research interests: EEG, visual attention, concussion, psychopathology
Email: vcarriqu at sfu.ca
Research interests: EEG, visual attention, concussion, psychopathology
Jessica Green completed her MA and PhD studies in HEL and then went on to Duke University as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Marty Woldorff's lab. While at SFU, she developed ways to "image" source activity of scalp-recorded EEG using the beam former method, and at Duke she developed ways to simultaneously record EEG and neuroimaging data to study control mechanisms of attention. She is now an associate professor at the University of South Carolina. Her lab continues to investigate the control of attention using sophisticated electrophysiological and neuroimaging techniques.
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Clayton Hickey completed his graduate studies in HEL. He is now an assistant professor at the University of Trento. His lab investigates the role of motivation and emotion in human cognition, focusing on reinforcement learning in perception and selection, using a broad spectrum of cognitive neuroscience techniques including: behavioural measures ( i. e., reaction time, task accuracy, and personality assessment); neuroimaging techniques (i.e., electroencephalogram, event-related potentials, and functional magnetic resonance imaging); and intervention techniques (i.e., transcranial electrical stimulation, and psychopharmacology).
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Ali Jannati completed his graduate studies in HEL. During his studies, Ali used ERPs to track the selective processing of salient objects, including attentional selection and suppression of targets and distractors, in various visual search tasks such as mixed- and fixed-feature search in the additional-singleton paradigm, as well as orientation-singleton (‘pop-out’) detection and attentional-window search tasks. He also studied the relationship between individual estimates of working-memory capacity and the rate of encoding in the visual system. He is currently pursuing his postdoctoral training in noninvasive brain stimulation at Harvard Medical School.
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Greg Christie is a research associate at the STAR Institute and has a PhD in Psychology from Simon Fraser University where he studied under the supervision of Dr. John McDonald. He also holds degrees in Neuroscience and New Media from the University of Lethbridge, and studied at the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience. His research is centered on the brain processes controlling cognition, with a focus on how we pay attention to certain stimuli, prioritize information, and ultimately make decisions. Currently, Greg spearheads the development of mobile applications at the Digital Health Hub that can improve the cognitive health of children and older adults.
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John Gaspar has a PhD in Psychology from Simon Fraser University where he studied in the Human Electrophysiology Laboratory. His research in the lab focused on target and distractor processing, as well as visual working memory capacity. Currently, John is completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California, where he investigates theories of attention using a variety of cognitive neuroscience techniques including behavioural measures of accuracy and reaction time, eye-tracker data, and electroencephalogram.
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Alannah Wallace did her BA Honours in Psychology at Simon Fraser University with John McDonald. As an undergraduate, she studied multisensory cueing paradigms and groups with abnormal attentional abilities. Her current research focuses on the nature of attentional suppression and target selection in people with and without ADHD symptomology. Presently, she studies as an MA student in Educational Psychology at Simon Fraser University.
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Kristen Thompson has recently graduated with a BA (Honours) degree in Psychology from Simon Fraser University. She did her undergraduate research on the attentional blink in the Human Electrophysiology Laboratory as well as regularly volunteered as a research assistant and later as the lab coordinator. She is currently a graduate student at University of Ottawa.
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Ellen Cornish graduated with a Bachelors in Psychology from Simon Fraser University. She volunteered as a research assistant in the Human Electrophysiology Laboratory for two years. Her research interests included studying neuropsychology. She is now pursuing CPA certification, and is working at a tech firm in Vancouver.
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Andrea Smit received her PhD in 2019 from SFU's Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Lab and spent some time as a post-doctoral student in HEL. Her interest in human electrophysiology is concentrated on circadian variation and impacts of sleep on early stages of neural processing. Her published work in Psychophysiology explores electrophysiological correlates of attention in early birds and night owls, and by measuring visually evoked, event-related brain potentials, highlights an inability for night owls to suppress irrelevant visual distractions in the morning.
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David Prime completed a post-doc at Simon Fraser University working with Dr. John McDonald. He is currently working at Douglas College as a Psychology instructor.