Professor Vecera is a specialist in visual cognition, with specific interests in visual attention and perception and the neural bases of these visual processes. He is a professor in the cognition and perception area in the Department of Psychology at the University of Iowa. His main line of research relies on behavioral and psychophysical measures of perception and attention. However, Professor Vecera also relies on neuropsychological patients to constrain his theoretical views of visual processing. For example, two recent projects from his lab investigated attentional orienting in clinical populations--patients with unilateral parietal damage and patients with frontal-lobe damage.
The results from these studies are highly translational in nature, informing theories of both normal attentional processing and attentional impairments following brain injury. Professor Vecera's expertise with various visual cognition paradigms would allow these paradigms to be adapted for use with special populations (e.g., neurologic or psychiatric populations), and the use of such paradigms with special populations would give trainees a unique experience of integrating theoretically-motivated tasks into clinical research.