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Name Pronunciation Guide:
"EF-ee puh-RARE-ah"

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B.A.H., Queen’s University, 2008
M.Sc., ¾ÅÐãÖ±²¥, 2014
Ph.D.,  McGill University, 2020

Curriculum Vitae [PDF]

Research Interests

My research focuses on understanding the dynamics of attention, which captures how this vital process ebbs and flows and fluctuates over time. Prioritizing attentional dynamics in this manner allows us to (i) account for the rich flexibility we see in attention across our everyday lives, (ii) grasp why patterns of attention can result in behaviour that is both adaptive and maladaptive, and (iii) highlight the unique individual factors that make your attention different from mine. To address these questions, I use behavioural experiments (e.g., attentional tasks, experience sampling, collaborative activities), psychophysiological methods (e.g., eye tracking, EEG, fMRI), and computational approaches (e.g., nonlinear analyses, machine learning) to study attentional dynamics in social situations, across internal thoughts, and within digital environments.

Selected Publications

Attentional Dynamics in Social Situations

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., 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).

Attentional Dynamics across Internal Thoughts

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).

Pereira, E. J., Gurguryan, L., & Ristic, J. (2020). Trait-level variability in attention modulates mind wandering and academic achievement. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 909.

Attentional Dynamics within Digital Environments

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.