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My name is Todd Horowitz and I am a cognitive scientist here at NCI.
I spent 17 years as a research faculty at Harvard Medical School before coming here.
And I came here to promote basic research in perception and attention.
Most of my research is focused on visual search and multiple object tracking.
"Visual Search" is simply put...
is how people find things in the visual environment.
So using visual search tasks we can study...
what features are easy for the visual system to process...
what features attract attention...
how is attention controlled and so forth.
Well here in our division at NCI, we are interested in cancer prevention and control.
I think it's easier to understand how basic research in perception
and attention is related if we think about....
what's called the cancer control continuum.
We conceptualize this in terms of continuum ranging from...
trying to persuade people not to engage in behaviors that are going to lead them
to get cancer in the first place...
moving through cancer screening, cancer diagnosis,
the effects of cancer treatment and issues of survivorship.
So there is this continuum...
And at pretty much every point in that continuum, I think there is somewhere
where our field, field vision science can make a contribution.
Anytime you have a human being looking at a visual stimulus...
at an image that needs to be processed...
... that's some place that our field can have an impact.
Move along the cancer control continuum into cancer treatment...
Of course treating cancer isn't itself a visual problem, but the treatments
for cancer might create problems that vision scientists and perception scientists.....
can help us to understand.
So there is a phenomenon that has been explored called "chemo brain"
which explores the potential negative effects of chemotherapy
on cognitive performance We really need to bring research on the all senses to bear,
we need to understand How chemotherapy for example, might affect hearing, taste...
And if we are going to convince people to engage in healthy eating behaviors,
that's going to require an understanding of taste and olfaction.
We are interested in encouraging research across all sensory domains.
So if you are doing work in perception and attention, and you want to get involved
in research that might be relevant to cancer, if you have a project
that you think we might be interested in funding...
please get in touch with me ...
you can find my email and telephone on the NCI website.
Drop me an email, give me a call...
that's what I'm here for!