Monica Castelhano
Professor, Chair of Cognitive Neuroscience Program
Department of Psychology
B.Sc., University of Toronto, 2000 M.A., Michigan State University, 2002 Ph.D., Michigan State University, 2005
Name Pronunciation Guide:
"mah-ni-caw ca-ste-LAW-no"
Click below to hear pronunciation
Research Interests
My primary research interests are in the visual attention and visual memory and how they function in our everyday lives. In the lab, we are currently studying these processes as they relate to real-world scenes. Across various studies we investigate how people perceive, explore, search through and remember information from complex, natural stimuli (i.e., real-world scenes). Using both behavioural and eye movement measures, we are interested in how we initially understand what we are viewing, how this then affects how we pay attention to our environment and then how this information is remembered over the long-term.
Selected Publications
Castelhano M.S. & KrzyÅ›, K. (2020). Rethinking Space: An overview of perception, attention and memory in scenes. Annual Review of Vision Science, in press.
Pereira, E.J. & Castelhano, M.S. & (2019). Attentional Capture is Contingent on Scene Region: Using Surface Guidance Framework to Explore Attentional Mechanisms during Search. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(4), 1273-1281.
Castelhano, M.S., Fernandes, S., & Theriault, J. (2019). Examining the Hierarchical Nature of Scene Representations in Memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 45(9):1619–1633.
Castelhano, M.S. & Witherspoon, R.L. (2016). How you use it matters: Object Function Guides Attention during Visual Search in Scenes. Psychological Science, 27(5), 606-621.
Pereira, E.J. & Castelhano, M.S. (2014) Peripheral guidance in scenes: The interaction of scene context and object content. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 40(5),2056-2072.
Castelhano, M.S. & Heaven, C. (2011). Scene Context influences without Scene Gist: Eye movements Guided by Spatial Associations in Visual Search. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18(5), 890-896.