Nilli Lavie

Nilli Lavie
Institutions	University College London (Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience)
Website www.attention-focus.com

Nilli Lavie, FBA, is a Professor of Psychology and Brain Sciences and Director of the Attention and Cognitive Control laboratory at the University College London Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. She is an elected Fellow of the British Academy, elected Fellow of the American Psychological Society, elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, and elected Fellow of the British Psychological Society. She is also an honorary life member of the UK Experimental Psychology Society. She is known for providing a resolution the 40 year debate on the role attention in information processing and as the creator of the Perceptual load theory of attention, perception and cognitive control.

Biography and Education

Prior to her academic career, Lavie was a well-known night-lifer^[1] in Tel Aviv Israel. She made various media appearances in both film (in the Lemon Popsicle film series and ‘A Message from the future’^[2]) and fashion (including modelling Fiorucci,^[3] Dunlop, and Merci Tights), and was a long-term partner of Israeli poet, artist, filmmaker, publicist and playwright David Avidan.

Lavie obtained BA Degrees in Psychology and in Philosophy from Tel Aviv University, where she also completed a PhD in Cognitive Psychology.

In the mid-nineties she was the first (and is still the only) psychologist to receive the prestigious Miller fellowship for postdoctoral training at UC Berkeley, which she held in Anne Treisman’s laboratory.

Following her postdoctoral training, she moved to the UK where she married the late Jon Driver and held her first faculty job at the MRC-Applied Psychology Unit (now the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit), Cambridge, UK. In late 1995 she joined UCL where she currently works and has written over 100 scientific papers.

She has received a British Psychological Society Cognitive Section Award for outstanding contribution to research on Human Cognition (2006). In 2011, she was selected as an "inspirational woman" in the WiSE (Women into Science, Engineering and Construction) campaign. In 2012 she received the Mid-Career Award from the Experimental Psychology Society . She was named an 'Academic Champion' at UCL (PALS division) and invited to give the first lecture at their inauguration (2012). She was also selected as an academic role model at UCL Faculty of Life Sciences (2012).

Research

Lavie’s research^{[4][5][6][7][8]} concerns the effects of information load on brain mechanisms, psychological functions (perception, conscious awareness, memory and emotion) and behaviour. This research is guided by the framework of her Load theory of attention and cognitive control.^[7][9] Lavie originally proposed the Load Theory in the mid-nineties^[4] to resolve the "Locus of Attentional Selection" debate. This debate started in the late fifties and stirred much research over the years.

Load Theory offered a new approach concerning the nature of information processing that reconciles the apparently contradicting views in this debate regarding the issue of capacity limits versus automaticity of processing. In Load Theory - perceptual information processing has limited capacity but processing proceeds automatically on all information within its capacity. The theory made an important contribution to the understanding of the impact of attention on information processing, visual perception and awareness. It also explains how people use their working memory during task performance and the ways in which people can exert cognitive control over their perception, attention and behaviour.^[7][9][10]

In the media

Lavie has made numerous media appearances in many TV science documentary programmes,^{[11][12][13][14]} interviews, and articles in the print and electronic media. These include UK media channels such as BBC One, BBC Two, BBC News, Channel 4 and in the print The Guardian, The Times, The Independent, New Scientist, The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail as well as international media outlets including Good Morning America, Discovery, National Geographic, Oprah, CBS News, NBC News, PBS Newshour, TIME, ESPN News, Fox News, Discover, Wired and Wall Street Journal in the US; ABC News in Australia; and Die Ziet in Germany, for example in the years 2015-16.^{[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37]}

References