Sam Ling

Associate Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences, BU College of Arts & Sciences

Director, Program in Brain, Behavior, and Cognition

Research Interests

The glut of information available for the brain to process at any given moment necessitates an efficient attentional system that can “pick and choose” what relevant information receives prioritized processing. Interestingly, a growing body of work suggests that one powerful way that attention separates the wheat from the chaff is by altering some of the most basic response properties in the brain. However, the mechanism our attentional system employs to filter information remains something of a mystery. Research in my lab combines a variety of techniques, including psychophysics, computational modeling, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)–all aimed towards understanding how the brain mediates between the “buzzing confusion” of the visual world and our limited processing power.