Luke Mason

I am interested in perception and action, particularly spatial attention, action planning, crossmodal sensory processing and body representation. You can read more about my research interests and current and past projects by click on the 'research' tab. 

If you are a participant for an EEG study, or if you're interested in becoming a participant, you'll find information on my Goldsmiths homepage, here. 

Academic qualifications

2008 BSc (hons, first class) Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London

2009 MSc (distinction) Research Methods in Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London

Teaching

Undergraduate tutorials

Visiting Tutor Rep. If you are a VT and are looking for a multitude of useful resources, please go here:  [learn.gold]

E-prime (experimental programming language) tutor. You'll fine lots of resources, including manuals and example experiments, as well as the ability to book into an E-Prime clinic, on the learn.gold page here:  [learn.gold]

Research Participation Scheme Admin. If you'd like to register as a researcher, to sign up as a student participant, or to find general information and an email address to contact the scheme admins, please go to the larn.gold page here: [learn.gold]

Grants & awards

Research interests

I am interested in a range of topics relating to visual perception (particularly attention), action, body representation and crossmodal processing. These topics are somewhat unified by the methods I use to investigate them, which are largely electrophysiological, and often involve the analysis of ERPs. 

I tend to use ERP "dot-probe" paradigms in which the amplitude of sensory evoked brain potentials, such as the N1 and P1 components, elicited by task-irrelevant probes, are compared under differing experimental conditions. The advantage of these methods is that they are well established and well understood, but lend themselves to creative implementations. They can also be used to compare differences in ERP amplitudes not only between experimental conditions, but also between stimulus modalities. As such the effects of, for example, spatial attention, can be compared at early stages of processing across visual, auditory and somatosensory modalities. 

PhD

My PhD is concerned with links between action and perception, specifically how the balance priorities in visual processing are affected by the intention to act upon an object. Even more specificially, I'm investigating how particular characteristics of an action affect visual processing, in terms of: 

1) The spatial "profile" of processing around the goal of an action. It is well established that the goal location of an action received enhanced processing, often characterised as a shift of spatial attention. I'm investigating how the areas at increasing distances from the goal are processed during action planning, and whether action-induced biases in processing fall off in a linear fashion, or whether something more complicated is happening. I'm particularly intersted in whether patterns of excitation and inhbitition emerge at different locations in space during movement planning, and whether the apparently simple process of selectivity is supported by more complicated patterns of processing priority. 

2) Whether visual processing during action planning operates purely in line with established principles of spatial attention. Attention has been hypothesised to operate as a "spotlight", as if selectivity is achieved in much the same way as shining the beam of a torch onto the visual field. More recent work has shown a more complicated pattern, and the consequences of action planning on visual perception are often implicitly assumed to follow this pattern. In manual movements, however, and unlike in spatial attention, an effector - usually the hand - is also involved. The position of the effector must be taken into account when planning movement; does this also affect visual processing? If so, can this be accounted for within "spotlight" metaphors of attention, or is a more pragamatic conception of attentional states required to account for the data?

3) How does the degree of accuracy required to successfully complete a movement affect visual processing? Are goal locations processed differently when they are smaller, and so hard to make contact with? How does the size of a target affect the profile of processing over space, as described in (1), above? Is the degree of accuracy an important enough factor to affect attentional states during action planning, or is the relative accuracy required of a movement deal with in later stages, once a movement has been executed?

Auditory spatial attention

I am also involved in an ongoing project with Jose Van Velzen and Alison Eardley investigating the properties of spatial attention in the auditory modality. Early work has shown that in addition to being easily deployed to the left or right hand side of space, auditory attention can also be selectively deployed to near and far space. Putative control signals, shown in visual attention tasks and thought to represent the operation of a fronto-parietal attentional control network were also found when attention shifted from near to far space. 

Auditory pseudo-neglect

Pseudo-neglect is manifested in neurologically healthy individuals during visual and auditory line bisection tasks. A project to provide further electrophysiological detail about this phenomenon is underway in conjunction with Jose Van Velzen and Alison Eardley.