Effie Pereira
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
Humphrey 343
B.A.H., Queen’s University, 2008
M.Sc., Queen's University, 2014
Ph.D., McGill University, 2020
Follow this link to my current website
Research Interests
My research investigates the temporal dynamics of human attention, which primarily concerns how our attentional processes fluctuate over time. These fluctuations give rise to seemingly random variations in behaviour, which can often be quite predictable and structured. Over the years, I have used computational approaches with behavioural, eye tracking, EEG, and fMRI methods to study temporal dynamics when attending to social contexts, internal contexts, and digital contexts.
Publications
Pereira, E. J.*, Ayers-Glassey, S.*, Wammes, J. D., & Smilek, D. (2023). Attention in hindsight: Using stimulated recall to capture dynamic fluctuations in attentional engagement. Behavior Research Methods, 1-32 (* equal contribution to the manuscript).
Drody, A. C.*, Pereira, E. J.*, & Smilek, D. (2023). The importance of accounting for off-task behaviours during data collection. Nature Human Behavior, 7, 1234–1236 (* equal contribution to the manuscript).
Drody, A. C., Pereira, E. J., & Smilek, D. (2023). A desire for distraction: Uncovering the rates of media multitasking during online research studies. Scientific Reports, 13, 781.
Pereira, E. J., Birmingham, E., & Ristic, J. (2022). Social attention as a general mechanism? Demonstrating the influence of stimulus content factors on social attentional biasing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 48(4), 289–311.
Pereira, E. J., Gurguryan, L., & Ristic, J. (2020). Trait-level variability in attention modulates mind wandering and academic achievement. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 909.
Pereira, E. J., Birmingham, E., & Ristic, J. (2019). The eyes do not have it after all? Attention is not automatically biased towards faces and eyes. Psychological Research, 84(5), 1407–1423.
Hayward, D. A.*, Pereira, E. J.*, Otto, A. R., & Ristic, J. (2017). Smile! Social reward drives attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 44(2), 206–214 (* equal contribution to the manuscript).