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• W20263007 abstract "Nilli Lavie is Professor of Psychology and Brain Sciences and leads the Attention and Cognitive Control group at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. She was previously at the MRC Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, following a Miller Institute postdoctoral fellowship in Anne Treisman's lab at UC Berkeley. She took her BA and PhD at Tel Aviv University. She is best known for her ‘load theory’ of attention, perception and cognitive control. Load theory provides a resolution of the ‘early versus late selection’ debate about the effect of attention on information processing, a debate that endured four decades of intensive research before it was resolved; load theory has since been developed and extended to many areas of information processing (ranging from elemental perception processes, to awareness, emotion and control of behavior) in the intact human brain, in clinical populations and in other species. What attracted you to biology? Although at high school my main aim was to get by without doing homework, I did develop a deep interest in biology and relished any insights into how biological systems work, at all levels, from molecules to principles of homoeostasis and evolution. There was one exception though: fieldwork. I was no nature girl, nor did I have enough patience to sit back and observe. In preparation for the Biotope part of final exams, I made one short visit to my Biotope field and concluded that nothing happened! A few months later I picked up a few plants and tried to pass the Biotope viva based on textbook knowledge augmented by just these few plants. Inevitably this did not work too well… Fortunately, the Biotope was only a small component of the final exams and my biology teacher kindly did not allow it to blemish my final grade, so as not to detract from a potential future career in biology. When I applied to University, however, I discarded mainstream biology because the course involved too much fieldwork for me. Did you plan to become a scientist in a different area? Not really, unless you accept science fiction as a form of science. Back then I planned to become an author and wrote a few synopses of possible novels. On a recent holiday I finally developed one of these synopses into the start of a novel. I looked into finding a literary agent but got distracted by my scientific work routine before finding one. In my next holiday I wrote a scientific review paper instead, so am coming to terms with the fact that fully pursing my scientific dreams just doesn't leave enough time to pursue other dreams. What drove you to continue with University education? In Israel, my University application was purely driven by the opportunity to shorten my army service duty by several months. I only learned about this opportunity in the nick of time, just before the deadline, so hastily put in an application ticking the two courses I knew least about: philosophy and psychology. They seemed interesting, if only for being new to me; they also clearly involved no fieldwork: they fitted the bill. I was accepted to both and, failing to decide which I preferred, embarked on a dual-degree track. And you found that you preferred psychology? Actually, during the first two years of the undergraduate course I enjoyed philosophy more than psychology. I chose the philosophy of science track and focused once again on biology (writing my bachelor thesis on the evolution of mind). I enjoyed the mix of studying in the daytime, while also being able to follow my other pursuits of fashion, indie rock music and Tel-Aviv nightlife (the first two I am still pursuing until this very day). I did pretty well in my studies, but excelled in the other pursuits, especially the nightlife. This, at least on paper (e.g. in the print media) appeared to be my true vocation, as I became a sort of a nightlifer/socialite and was regularly covered in the gossip columns (sometimes for my interesting outfits, but most of the times for the men I dated!). On the academic front, following two years of philosophical discourse I became frustrated with its inability to achieve closure through empirical tests. At the same time I thoroughly enjoyed the psychology final-year options of ‘neurophysiology of pain’ and ‘attention and perception’; these brought back my appetite for empirical biology and so I decided to apply for a PhD in one of these directions. Did your nightlife ‘career’ have any effect on your academic career? My intensive nightlife engagements did not directly impact on my studies: I worked as hard as I partied. But there were a few instances where with hindsight I suspect there may have been some effects. One example was during my physiology PhD interview, the chair of the interviewing panel appeared doubtful of the seriousness of my intentions and asked me whether I realised that my PhD lab work would not be all that glamorous and would involve injecting rats on a daily basis? A long discussion of two opponent models of neurotransmission for pain convinced the committee that I was serious and I was offered a place. But his words did have some impact on my choice, and I never worked with rats. On reflection I sometimes regret not having gone in that direction, as I do believe that understanding neurotransmission can provide some key answers to major questions in cognitive neuroscience: including one question that I am truly obsessed with, namely the underlying causes for the wide-ranging effects of capacity limits in information processing. What did you work on during your PhD? Having gone for a PhD on attention and perception, I faced a new challenge: my PhD advisor, Yehoshua Tsal, advised me to come up with a whole new theory for my PhD. This was not his routine advice, but a true vote of confidence in my ability and I am eternally grateful for his vote of confidence. I followed his advice and spent a good deal of the first few months of my PhD going to the library every day, reading journal articles hoping that at some point I would come up with theoretical insight. At first, I came up with some flimsy idea which failed to fly; I went back to the library, and read and thought some more. Then I came with a plea to escape this challenge and be assigned a conventional PhD project. My advisor rejected the plea. My next idea was that I could solve the enduring ‘early versus late selection’ debate, over the stage(s) at which attention affects information processing, with a new account that I came up with: load theory. My advisor smiled sceptically but was willing to hear my idea. Following a careful consideration he concluded that he was not convinced. I then described the first critical test and as a hard-nosed empiricist he agreed that, if the results supported my prediction, then perhaps I could continue working on the idea, although his hunch was that it would not work. I still recall the suspense; looking at the first dataset I was literally holding my breath, then jumping with excitement when seeing that the results supported my prediction! I ended up establishing the first grounds for load theory in my PhD thesis. My work over subsequent years has developed this account, and convinced many people of the critical role of information load in determining the effects of attention on perception and related neural activity. My PhD advisor, however, remains unconvinced to this day. What happened next? Towards the end of my PhD, I had the opportunity to meet Danny Kahneman, winner of the 2002 economics Nobel Prize for his work on decision making, during his visit to Tel-Aviv University. Kahneman had also made a major contribution to attention research earlier in his career, being among the originators of the capacity approach to attention and this line of his work was one main source of inspiration for my load theory. He gave very encouraging feedback on my work, suggesting I send my first paper to Psychological Review. This meant a lot to me as he was the first to give me clearly positive feedback. He added that he no longer worked on attention, so there were no postdoctoral positions for this type of work in his lab, but mentioned that his wife would be really interested in my work. His wife was (and still is) Anne Treisman: following an email exchange and a visit to her lab at UC Berkeley, I ended up successfully obtaining a postdoctoral fellowship from the Miller Institute for Basic Science and held it in her lab. Do you have any scientific heroes? I consider myself exceptionally fortunate to have received detailed advice and mentoring from Anne Treisman on a weekly basis, even though we never actually collaborated! I remain in awe of her incredible generosity. Later, as a junior scientist in the MRC Cambridge unit, I was expected to collaborate with the group leader: John Duncan. He, too, spent many hours on interesting and most educative discussions with me, even though it was clear that our thinking paths were a little too divergent for us to collaborate successfully. Anne and John are both true idols to me: they don't make scientists like them anymore! How did you become interested in neuroscience? My first source of direct exposure to neuroscience was at UC Berkeley, where I watched a rare neurological patient who, following a bilateral parietal lesion, suffered from Balint's syndrome and was tested regularly in the lab. I was struck by his inability to see more than one object at a time despite having an intact visual cortex. This made me interested in the parietal cortex and its role in capacity limits on visual perception. I followed up this interest in Cambridge, where I saw patients with unilateral neglect following unilateral parietal damage, and in London, using neuroimaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), with my UCL collaborators Geraint Rees (with whom I have had a most productive collaborative relationship since 1997) and Vincent Walsh (who taught me all that I know about TMS). These combined methods allowed investigation of the involvement of parietal cortex in various phenomena of visual perception and its limits, including subjective blindness when the parietal cortex is disrupted with TMS or occupied with a high information load. How did you get into functional neuroimaging? During my interview for a lectureship at UCL, Chris Frith was a member of the interviewing panel and asked whether load theory makes any predictions for neuroimaging. I laid out the critical prediction derived from load theory, namely that visual cortex responses to distractor stimuli should depend on the level of load in the attended task, in the same manner as I had shown in my behavioural studies. About a year later, following a departmental seminar, Chris introduced me to his PhD student saying: “Geraint, this is Nilli: we will be testing together the critical prediction from her load theory”. We then met in my office and quickly designed the study leading to our Rees, Frith and Lavie (1997) Science paper. What are you up to these days? Much of my work is still linked by a central focus on the effects of information load on brain mechanisms, various psychological functions (perception, conscious awareness, memory and emotion) and behavior. This central focus on load goes back to my PhD work, but while earlier on I focused on establishing the basic science behind these effects, I am now pursuing also some of the theory's applications for clinical populations and to everyday life. For example, under some circumstances a high information load can lead to failures to notice important information (a phenomenon termed ‘inattentional blindness’). This has a variety of practical implications, such as for better design of vehicles and aeroplanes: I am now collaborating with the automotive industry, pursuing applications of this to driving. The effects of load on information processing can sometimes be positive as well. My research has shown that people are better able to ignore distracting stimuli when they perform a task that involves higher information load. This work suggests new ways of improving focused attention abilities, with implications that range from optimizing learning (for example, in educational settings), to helping individuals with attention difficulties (such as those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ‘ADHD’) as currently pursued in my lab." @default.
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