Brian Anderson

About

Brian Anderson is a Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences and holds the Charles Puryear Professorship in Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. He is also the founding Director of the Human Imaging Facility. Anderson received his B.A. in Social Science from the University of Maine at Augusta, an M.S. in Psychology from Villanova University where he studied under Charles Folk, and a Ph.D. in Psychological & Brain Sciences from Johns Hopkins University where he studied under the late Steven Yantis. His research has been recognized with several prestigious awards including the Steven Yantis Early Career Award from the Psychonomic Society, the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in the area of Perception and Motor Performance from the American Psychological Association, the Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science, and the Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award from the Vision Sciences Society, among other honors.

Research topics

• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Machine Learning
• Cognitive psychology
• Psychology
• Cognitive science
• Neuroscience
• Geology
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• The past, present, and future of selection history

  Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews · 2021 · 192 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  DOI

• The influence of threat on the efficiency of goal-directed attentional control

  Psychological Research · 2020 · 35 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Reliably measuring learning-dependent distractor suppression with eye tracking

  Behavior Research Methods · 2024-12-18 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In the field of psychological science, behavioral performance in computer-based cognitive tasks often exhibits poor reliability. The absence of reliable measures of cognitive processes contributes to non-reproducibility in the field and impedes the investigation of individual differences. Specifically in visual search paradigms, response time-based measures have shown poor test-retest reliability and internal consistency across attention capture and distractor suppression, but one study has demo…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Getting a grip on visual search: Relating effort exertion to the control of attention

  Attention Perception & Psychophysics · 2025-02-01 · 3 citations

  review1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Aversive conditioning, anxiety, and the strategic control of attention

  Cognition & Emotion · 2024-10-21 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  What we pay attention to is influenced by both reward learning and aversive conditioning. Although early attention tends to be biased toward aversively conditioned stimuli, sustained ignoring of such stimuli is also possible. How aversive conditioning influences how a person chooses to search, or the strategic control of attention, has not been explored. In the present study, participants learned an association between a colour and an aversive outcome during a training phase, and in a subsequent…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant F31DA033754

  NIH · $84k · 2015

• Components of selection history and the control of attention

  NIH · $1.9M · 2019–2024

Frequent coauthors

• Andy Jeesu Kim

  University of Southern California

  52 shared

• Laurent Grégoire

  Texas A&M University

  47 shared

• Haena Kim

  University of Chicago

  42 shared

• Andrew Clement

  Millsaps College

  36 shared

• Steven Yantis

  34 shared

• Ming‐Ray Liao

  Texas A&M University

  29 shared

• Susan Courtney

  Johns Hopkins University

  22 shared

• James Grindell

  Texas A&M University

  15 shared

Labs

• Learning & Attention LabPI

Awards & honors

• APS Fellow
• Charles Puryear Professorship in Liberal Arts

Similar researchers at Texas A&M University

• John Edensh-61
• Gerianne Alexanderh-58
• Mindy Bergmanh-28