Timothy Vickery
Timothy Vickery
Associate Chair
Office location
University of Delaware, 105 The Green, Room 227, Wolf Hall, Newark, DE 19716
Lab
302-831-3532 / Wolf Hall, Room 428
Education
- Ph.D. – Harvard University
- M.A. – Harvard University
- B.S. – Vanderbilt University
Biography
Timothy Vickery, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of Delaware. The cognitive neuroscientist is primarily interested in visual cognition, encompassing visual perception, attention, and working / long-term visual memory.
Vickery seeks to understand both the cognitive and neural bases of varied phenomena using both behavioral experiments and neuroimaging in the form of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Recent work in the Vickery lab has focused on visual learning. We often learn incidentally — that is, we learn about statistical relationships without trying to do so. What governs this form of learning and how does it occur? What uses to we have for these sorts of memories in everyday cognition?
Other recent work in Vickery's Perception and Learning Lab focuses on understanding how perceptual grouping works, the role of objects in visual perception and attention, and how working memory and attention interact.
Courses Regularly Taught
PSYC 310: Sensation & Perception
PSYC 860: Psychological Statistics
Research Projects
Area: Cognitive Psychology
We study visual selective attention using tasks such as visual search. We are interested in how visual attention is interdependent on visual working memory (short-term visual memory stores), as well as how long-term learning shapes visual attention. For instance, how do the contents of visual working memory affect attention (Beck & Vickery, 2019, 2020). We employ behavioral experiments and fMRI neuroimaging to study these phenomena.
We study an important set of phenomena that fall under the umbrella of “perceptual organization,” such as perceptual grouping effects first studied by the Gestalt psychologists. These phenomena reflect mid-level human vision processes that set the stage for visual understanding, recognition, and visuomotor integration. Recently, we have begun investigating individual differences in these phenomena, searching for clues as to which ones share underlying mechanisms. We study this with human psychophysical experiments that measure the effects of different kinds of grouping and segmentation.
Objects seem to distort the perception of spatial relationships (Vickery & Chun, 2010). Current psychophysical and neuroimaging research in the Vickery lab seeks to map and better understand how and when this distortion occurs, when it leads to expansion vs. compression of perception, how this illusion relates to brain activity (measured with fMRI), and why it might arise from the way that objects are represented in visual cortex.
Humans rapidly learn statistical associations among visual stimuli, even when they are not aware of such contingencies and are not trying to learn those associations. This is called visual statistical learning, and it may play an important role in such tasks as navigation and categorization, or even in basic perceptual organization. In the Perception and Learning lab, we use behavior and fMRI neuroimaging to study numerous aspects of this phenomenon: when, how, and why it occurs, and what are the consequences?
