Social Sciences
Research Interests: Visual attention, Perception, Psychophysics, Perceptual Learning
Profile
Professor Nithin George received his PhD from the IIT Gandhinagar in 2021, and his Masters in Cognitive Science from Allahabad University in 2014. He was formerly a Graduate Teaching Fellow at IIT Gandhinagar and a visiting faculty at Nirma University. He worked at Duke University in the USA as a visiting scholar studying how prior experience influences people’s ability to rapidly detect and identify objects. His work has been published in ‘Frontiers in Human Neuroscience’.
Professor George is interested in mechanisms that underlie human perceptual experience. By performing controlled experiments on human observers, his doctoral research investigated how the learning of regularities in the environment can alter our perceptual experience. Through his research, he aims to identify human psychological states from first principles by explaining mental functions as shaped by evolutionary constraints. Professor George is an Assistant Professor in the Humanities and Languages division of the School of Arts and Sciences.
Research
Professor George’s doctoral research found behavioural evidence for the effect of expectation and statistical learning on attention. The evidence calls for a re-definition of the construct of attention as a more dynamic mechanism that enables adaptive behaviour. This thesis grounds attention as a process through which we estimate the statistical properties of the sensory information. A statistical approach helps to integrate findings from various domains of research from sensory psychophysics to human decision making.
Publications
- George, N., & Sunny, M. M. (2022). Dissociable effects of attention and expectation on perceptual sensitivity to action-outcomes. Consciousness and Cognition, 103, 103374.
- George, N., & Egner, T. (2022). Stimulus variability and task relevance modulate binding-learning. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 84, 1151–1166, https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-021-02338-6
- George, N., & Sunny, M. M. (2019). Challenges to the modularity thesis under the Bayesian brain models. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 13, 353.