Helene Intraub
Helene Intraub
Office location
University of Delaware, 105 The Green, Room 229, Wolf Hall, Newark, DE 19716
Lab
302-831-8181 / Wolf Hall, Room 413-415
Education
- Ph.D. – Brandeis University
- B.A. – State University of New York at Stony Brook
Biography
Helene Intraub, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Delaware.
The world is continuous, but sensory input is not. We perceive a coherent representation of the world, despite the piecemeal nature of successive eye fixations and the distinctly different types of information perceived through our sensory modalities (e.g., vision vs. touch). What role does knowledge and expectation play in organizing and remembering these experiences?
Intraub and her students conduct research on visual scene perception, imagination and memory, as well as haptic and bimodal representation. They study constructive memory errors, and what these reveal about the organizing structures that underlie perception of objects and scenes. Although the Spatial Cognition Lab primarily focuses on adult cognition, she and her students also take a developmental perspective on these topics in research at the University's Early Learning Center.
Helene Intraub is a fellow at the Association for Psychological Science and the Psychonomic Society. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.
Elected to the governing board of the Psychonomic Society (2009-2014), she became chair in 2013. Intraub has been a program director at NSF, and a representative at FABBS and the Counsel of Science Society Presidents. She serves on the advisory board of Women in Cognitive Science, and is a member of the Committee of Science and the Arts at the Franklin Institute.
An advocate of science outreach, Intraub was honored to have her research on boundary extension featured in the Exploratorium Science Museum's exhibit, "Human Memory," and the subsequent five-year International Science Museum Tour.
Courses Regularly Taught
PSYC340: Cognition
PSYC642: Neuropsychology of Mental Representation and Memory
Research Projects in Cognitive Psychology
STEM learning draws heavily on spatial cognitive abilities. At the University of Delaware Early Learning Center, we conduct scene perception and spatial memory research with 4-5 year old preschool children, exploring rapid scene perception and testing to determine the developmental trajectory of anticipatory spatial projections, such as boundary extension. Through collaboration with other labs we have tested infant scene memory and are studying spatial memory in children with developmental disorders.
Most scene perception research makes use of photographs as stimuli. Here we seek to understand the mental representation of regions of real space given the ability to navigate and to gain input for different modalities (vision and haptics) – independently and in combination. We have studied memory in blindfolded-sighted individuals and a woman who was deaf and blind since early life. We also study the interaction of top-down expectations and low vision (simulated loss of periphery) on memory for surrounding space.
Using brief presentation and eye tracking experiments we study what can grasped in a fraction of a second from a scene. We have also observed rapid effects of top-down expectations on what is remembered – observing false memory for unseen information just beyond the boundaries of a view as soon as 1/20th after viewing a photograph – a phenomenon called boundary extension, discovered in our lab. In behavioral studies we explore the multiple factors that affect both veridical and anticipatory memory that predicts upcoming layout. Through collaboration with other labs we explore the brain mechanisms underlying boundary extension.
