oliviacarter

Username: oliviacarter

Participant details

	Network Member	Olivia Carter
	Organisation/Institution	University of Melbourne
	Department/Centre	Department of Psychology
	Lab
	Website	http://www.psych.unimelb.edu.au/people/staff/CarterO.html
	Research area	cognitive neuroscience
	Research keywords	perception, attention, cognition, pharmacology

Research Interests

“How does the brain generate a conscious experience?” The majority of my research is motivated by this general question. There are a million different ways to address this question, but most of my work focuses on ambiguous stimuli and other illusions that involve big perceptual changes or large parts of an image disappearing completely. One striking example is binocular rivalry, a phenomenon that occurs when different stimuli are presented to the left and right eye simultaneously. Despite the fact that the two images are always being presented, people generally report only seeing one of the images at a time because the other image is completely suppressed from awareness. The second focus of my research aims to address the question “What role does pharmacology play in determining our perceptual experience?” A lot of research has shown that neurotransmitters (and drugs that target these neurotransmitter systems) have a huge impact on emotion and arousal, but less is known about the role of neurotransmitters in shaping our sensory experience. In an attempt to investigate this question I have studied some of the perceptual effects of hallucinogens and other drugs that disrupt the serotonergic system.

Member for: 2 years 7 months 1 weeks 3 days