Stefanie Becker

Stefanie was awarded a PhD in Cognitive Psychology / Experimental Psychology in 2007, from the University of Bielefeld, Germany, and was subsequently awarded two awards for it (amongst them the National German Dissertation Award). She then took up a 1-year post-doc position with Prof Roger Remington at UQ. Subsequently, her work was supported by various fellowships from UQ and the ARC, allowing Stefanie to focus mainly on research from 2009 - 2018. Afterwards she was employed on a Teaching and Research position at UQ, where she is currently employed as an Associate Professor. Testing the relational account of attention (Becker, 2010): In 2010, I proposed a new relational account of attention and eye movements. Contrary to the standard feature detector views, it proposes that attention is always tuned to the relative features of objects (e.g., larger, redder, darker). Relative features are encoded at a very early stage of processing and are very stable against variations in lighting, distance and perspective. We have tested and confirmed the predictions of the relational account using eye tracking, EEG and fMRI, but there is still much to do to arrive at a complete and correct theory of attention. Emotion and Attention: Can emotional factors such as happy or angry faces involuntarily attract our attention, possibly because angry faces may constitute a threat? In my lab, this question has been intensely studied, often with EEG or eye movements, and our research has shown that both perceptual factors such as saliency and emotional states such as our own mood can modulate attention to emotional faces. Please see Projects at http://www.sibecker.com for further details.

[2025] How do relative features guide attention in visual search? (Conference Publication) [2025] Visual search is relational without prior context learning (Journal Article) [2025] Participant mood modulates attention and eye movements in visual search for emotional faces (Journal Article) [2025] Inhibition in large set sizes depends on search mode, not salience (Journal Article) [2023] Faces capture spatial attention only when we want them to: an inattentional blindness EEG study (Journal Article) [2023] Tuning to non-veridical features in attention and perceptual decision-making: An EEG study (Journal Article) [2023] Fixation-related electrical potentials during a free visual search task reveal the timing of visual awareness (Journal Article) [2023] Attentional selection is a sufficient