Brian Anderson
  • APS Fellow, Charles Puryear Professorship in Liberal Arts
Google Scholar Profile
Research Areas
  • Affective Science
  • Cognition & Cognitive Neuroscience

Research Interests

Research Interests

My team and I are broadly interested in how learning changes the way in which people direct their attention. To study this, we employ human psychophysics and functional neuroimaging methodologies, using the techniques of experimental psychology and perception science. Our work sheds light on fundamental theories of attentional control and has implications for our understanding habit learning and drug addiction, psychopathology more broadly, threat habituation and workplace accidents, implicit bias, social development, impulsive behaviors, the nature of distraction, free will and human agency, and the phylogenetic origins of human information processing. 

Affiliated Research Cluster

Affective Science. Reward learning, punishment learning, and attention.

 

Office Hours: By appointment

 

Accepting Students for 2025-2026?: No

 

Memberships: Institute for Neuroscience

Selected Publications

  • Recent Publications

    • Anderson, B. A. (in press). Rethinking distraction. Visual Cognition.
    • Gregoire, L., Dubravac, M., Moore, K., Kim, N., & Anderson, B. A. (in press). Observational learning of threat-related attentional bias. Cognition and Emotion.
    • Clement, A., & Anderson, B. A. (in press). Statistically learned associations among objects bias attention. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics.
    • Anderson, B. A. (in press). Filtering distractors is costly. Cognition and Emotion.
    • Liesefeld, H. R., Lamy, D., Gaspelin, N., Geng, J., Kerzel, D., Leber, A., Schall, J. D., Allen, H., Anderson, B. A., Busch, N., Boettcher, S., Carlisle, N., Colonius, H., Draschkow, D., Egeth, H., Müller, H. J., Röer, J. P., Schubö, A., Slagter, H., Theeuwes, J., & Wolfe, J. (in press). Terms of debate: Consensus definitions to guide the scientific discourse on visual distraction. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics.
    • Kim, N., Gregoire, L., Razavi, M., Yan, N., Lee, D. S., Lewis, P., Ahn, C. R., & Anderson, B. A. (in press). Protocols for evaluating the effectiveness of virtual accident experience in enhancing sensory responses to real-world warning. STAR Protocols.
    • Anderson, B. A., Kim. N., Gregoire, L., Yan, N., & Ahn, C. R. (2024). Attention failures cause workplace accidents: Why workers ignore hazards and what to do about it. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 11, 27-35.
    • Anderson, B. A. (2024). Trichotomy revisited: A monolithic theory of attentional control. Vision Research, 217, 108366.
    • Lee, D. S.*, Clement, A.*, & Anderson, B. A. (2024). When detecting a salient target makes search more effortful. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 153, 590-607. *denotes co-first-authorship
    • Yan, N., & Anderson, B. A. (2024). Attribute amnesia as a product of experience-dependent encoding. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 31, 772-780.
    • Kim, A. J.*, Lee, D. S.*, Grindell, J. D., & Anderson, B. A. (2024). Selection history and the strategic control of attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 50, 204-211. *denotes co-first-authorship
    • Gregoire, L., & Anderson, B. A. (2024). Instructional learning of threat-related attentional capture. Emotion, 24, 531-537.
    • Anderson, B. A. (2024). An examination of the motivation to manage distraction. Cognition, 250, 105862.
    • Anderson, B. A., & Lee, D. S. (2023). Visual search as effortful work. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152, 1580-1597.
    • Lee, D. S., & Anderson, B. A. (2023). Selection history contributes to suboptimal attention strategies. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 30, 1866-1873.
    • Clement, A., & Anderson, B. A. (2023). Statistical learning facilitates the strategic use of attentional control. Cognition, 239, 105536.
    • Clement, A., Gregoire, L., & Anderson, B. A. (2023). Generalization of value-based attentional priority is category-specific. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 76, 2401-2409.
    • Liao, M.-R., Kim, A. J., & Anderson, B. A. (2023). Neural correlates of value-driven spatial orienting. Psychophysiology, 60, e14321.
    • Liao, M.-R., Dillard, M. H., Hour, J. L., Barnett, L. A., Whitten, J. S., Valles, A. C., Anderson, B. A.*, & Yorzinski, J. L.* (2023). Reward history modulates visual attention in an avian model. Animal Cognition, 26, 1685-1695. *denotes co-senior-authorship (equal-contribution)
    • Liao, M.-R., Grindell, J. D., & Anderson, B. A. (2023). A comparison of mental imagery and perceptual cueing across domains of attention. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 85, 1834-1845.
    • Kim, H., Ogden, A., & Anderson, B. A. (2023). Statistical learning of distractor shape modulates attentional capture. Vision Research, 202, 108155.
    • Kim, H., & Anderson, B. A. (2023). Primary rewards and aversive outcomes have comparable effects on attentional bias. Behavioral Neuroscience, 137, 89-94.
    • Kim, H., & Anderson, B. A. (2023). On the relationship between value- and threat-driven attentional capture and approach-avoidance biases. Brain Sciences, 13(2), 158.
    • Ogden, A., Kim, H., & Anderson, B. A. (2023). Combined influence of valence and statistical learning on the control of attention II: Evidence from within-domain additivity. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 85, 277-283.
    • Yan, N., Grindell, J. D., & Anderson, B. A. (2023). Encoding history enhances working memory encoding: Evidence from attribute amnesia. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 49, 589-599.
    • Kim, N.*, Gregoire, L.*, Razavi, M., Yan, N., Ahn, C. R., & Anderson, B. A. (2023). Virtual accident curbs risk habituation in construction workers by restoring sensory responses to warning signals. iScience, 26, 105827. *denotes co-first-authorship
    • Kim, N., Yan, N., Gregoire, L., Anderson, B. A., & Ahn, C. R. (2023). Road construction workers’ boredom proneness, habituation to warning alarms, and accident proneness: A virtual reality experiment. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 149, 04022175.
    • Chen, Y., Chen, S., Zhang, X., Zhang, S., Jia, K., Anderson, B. A., & Gong, M. (2023). Reward history modulates attention based on feature relationship. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152, 1937-1950.
    • Kim, A. J., & Anderson, B. A. (2022). Systemic effects of selection history on learned ignoring. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 29, 1347-1354.
    • Gregoire, L., Britton, M. K., & Anderson, B. A. (2022). Motivated suppression of value- and threat-modulated attentional capture. Emotion, 22, 780-794.
    • Gregoire, L., Mrkonja, L., & Anderson, B. A. (2022). Cross-modal generalization of value-based attentional priority. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 84, 2423-2431.
    • Lee, D. S., Kim, A. J., & Anderson, B. A. (2022). The influence of reward history on goal-directed visual search. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 84, 325-331.
    • Anderson, B. A., Liao, M.-R., & Gregoire, L. (2022). Pavlovian learning in the selection history-dependent control of overt spatial attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 48, 783-789.
    • Anderson, B. A., & Mrkonja, L. (2022). This is a test: Oculomotor capture when the experiment keeps score. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 84, 2115-2126.
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