He is fascinated by both our amazing cognitive abilities and their severe limitations. Despite having complex brains with billions of neurons, we have trouble doing two things at once or making fairly elementary inferences. So why do attention, working memory, and reason so often fail? What can we do about such failures? And what can we learn from them? He studies these questions by conducting behavioral experiments, building computational models, and employing functional neuroimaging. Using these approaches, my colleagues and himself hope to better understand cognition and its neural underpinnings.
1.Kong, D., Asplund, C.L., Ling, A., & Chee, M.W.L. (in press). Increased automaticity and altered temporal preparation following sleep deprivation. Sleep.
2. Yeo, B.T.T., Krienen, F.M., Eickhoff, S.B., Yaakub, S.N., Fox, P.T., Buckner, R.L., Asplund, C.L., & Chee, M.W.L. (in press). Functional specialization and flexibility in human association cortex. Cerebral Cortex.
3. Asplund, C.L., Fougnie, D., Zughni, S., Martin, J.W., & Marois, R. (2014). The attentional blink reveals the probabilistic nature of discrete conscious perception. Psychological Science, 25(3): 824-831.
4. Asplund, C.L. & Chee, M.W.L. (2013). Time-on-task and sleep deprivation effects are evidenced in overlapping brain areas. NeuroImage, 82: 326-335.
5. Tombu, M.N, Asplund, C.L., Dux, P.E., Godwin, D., Martin, J.W., & Marois, R. (2011). A unified attentional bottleneck in the human brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(33): 13426-31.
6. Asplund, C.L., Todd, J.J., Snyder, A.P., Gilbert, C.M., & Marois, R. (2010). Surprise-induced blindness: A stimulus-driven attentional limit to conscious perception. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 36(6): 1372-81.
7. Fougnie, D., Asplund, C.L., & Marois, R. (2010). What are the units of storage in visual working memory? Journal of Vision, 10(12):27, 1-11.
8. Asplund, C.L., Todd, J.J., Snyder, A.P., & Marois, R. (2010). A central role for the lateral prefrontal cortex in goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention. Nature Neuroscience, 13(4): 507-12.
9. Buckholtz, J.W., Asplund, C.L., Dux, P.E., Zald, D.H., Gore, J.C., Jones, O.D., & Marois, R. (2008). The neural correlates of third-party punishment. Neuron, 60(5): 930-40.