Nilli Lavie

Nilli Lavie
Institutions	University College London (Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience)
Website www.attention-focus.com

Nilli Lavie is a Professor of Psychology and Brain Sciences and Director of the Attention and Cognitive Control laboratory at the University College London Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. She is an elected Fellow of the American Psychological Society, elected Fellow of the Society of Biology, and elected Fellow of the British Psychological Society. She is also an honorary life member of the UK Experimental Psychology Society. She is known for helping resolve the 40 year debate on the role attention in information processing and as the creator of the Perceptual load theory of attention, perception and cognitive control.

Biography and Education

Prior to her academic career, Lavie was a well-known night-lifer^[1] in Tel Aviv Israel. She made various media appearances in both film (in the Lemon Popsicle film series and ‘A Message from the future’^[2]) and fashion (including modelling Fiorucci,^[3] Dunlop and Merci Tights), and was a long-term partner of Israeli poet, artist filmmaker, publicist and playwright David Avidan.

In the mid-nineties she left Tel Aviv, obtained BA Degrees in Psychology and in Philosophy from Tel Aviv University, where she also completed a PhD in Cognitive Psychology , and moved to the UK where she married the late Jon Driver.

Her first faculty job was at the MRC-Applied Psychology Unit (now the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit), Cambridge, UK. She is the first (and still the only) psychologist to receive the prestigious Miller fellowship postdoctoral training in Anne Treisman’s laboratory at UC Berkeley. In 1995 she joined UCL where she currently works and has written over 100 scientific papers.

She has received a British Psychological Society^[4] Cognitive Section Award for outstanding contribution to research on Human Cognition (2006). In 2011, she was selected as an "inspirational woman" in the WiSE (Women into Science, Engineering and Construction)^[5] campaign, and in 2012 she was named an academic champion at UCL (PALS division)^[6] and invited to give the first lecture at their inauguration. She also received the Mid-Career Award from the Experimental Psychology Society^[7] (2012)^[8] and was selected as an academic role model at UCL Faculty of Life Sciences (2012)^[9]

Research

Lavie’s research^{[10][11][12][13][14]} concerns the effects of information load on brain mechanisms, psychological functions (perception, conscious awareness, memory and emotion) and behaviour. This research is guided by the framework of her Load theory of attention and cognitive control.^[13][15] Lavie originally proposed the Load Theory in the mid-nineties^[10] to resolve the "Locus of Attentional Selection" debate. This debate started in the late fifties and stirred much research over the years.

Load Theory offered a new approach concerning the nature of information processing that reconciles the apparently contradicting views in this debate regarding the issue of capacity limits versus automaticity of processing. In Load Theory - perceptual information processing has limited capacity but processing proceeds automatically on all information within its capacity. The theory made an important contribution to the understanding of how people use their working memory during task performance and the ways in which people can exert cognitive control over their perception, attention and behaviour.^[13][15][16]

In the media

Lavie has featured in various science documentary programmes, including Channel 4 ("Terror in the skies series", June 2013), BBC Horizon ("How to avoid mistakes in medical surgery.", March 2013), National Geographic ("The truth behind crop circles", 2010), Discovery Channel USA ("Weird Connections: The invisible Gorilla", December 2008), BBC 5 Live Radio (May 2007) and ABC News ("Magic brain", January 2006).

Her work has also been covered many times in the media, including BBC1’s Have I Got News For You (June 2, 2007), BBC News ("Watch my hands deceive you", July 2005; "Why we can miss 'obvious' sights", August 2005; "Employee test spots inattention", May 2007; "Key to subliminal messaging is to keep it negative, study shows", September 2009; "Can brain scans help companies sell more?", March 2010; "People spend 'half their waking hours daydreaming", November 2010; "Will adverts at the Olympics increase fast food consumption?", April 2012; "Why do radiologists miss dancing gorillas?", February 2013; "What we can learn from fatal mistakes in surgery", March 2013; "Why children can't see what's right in front of them", May 2014), BBC Radio 4 (Leading Edge" Feb 2002, March 2002; Science in Action, August 2005; "All in the mind", May 2014), Sky Digital ("Change blindness" documentary, April 2002), ABC News ("Magic brain", January 2006), Channel 4 News ("Distraction test for job seekers", May 2007), among many other outlets.^[17]

References