ProfessorEvan Livesey

My research focuses on the mechanisms responsible for learning, attention and cognitive control. I have specific interests in associative learning mechanisms in humans and other animals, inhibitory control, the relationship between learning and visual attention, and how learning is influenced by conscious knowledge, reasoning, and executive control.

Key areas of interest:

Associative Learning Mechanisms

• How are stimuli and their anticipated consequences represented during associative learning?
• What role do associative processes play in discrimination and generalisation?

Learning and Cognitive Control

• How do we alter well-learned actions and decisions when our goals suddenly change?
• How does knowledge based on explicit instruction interact with and update predictions made from previous experience?

Selective Attention and Visual Cognition

• How do we attend to or ignore rapidly presented information?
• To what extent do we process distracting information that we are trying to suppress?
• How does learning affect selective attention and visual cognition?
• How do we learn to attend to relevant (and ignore irrelevant) visual information.

Learning and Reasoning

• How does instance-based learning interact with rule abstraction?
• What conditions maximise the learning and transfer of relational concepts?
• How does performance of a well-learned action relate to our expectations and deliberate intentions?

My research aligns with the Faculty of Science Research Strengths - Brain, Behaviour and Cognition, Health and Wellbeing Across the Lifespan, Decision making for a sustainable future.