Dr Daniel Pearson

Dr Daniel Pearson is a cognitive psychologist whose research examines the influence of learned experience (i.e., selection history) on perception, selective attention, and cognitive control. Daniel is interested in understanding the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying visual cognition, with a view to applying these findings to real world contexts (e.g., designing alerts and warnings to rapidly capture attention) as well as to further our understanding of psychopathology (e.g., understanding how attention to reward-related cues interacts with substance use disorders and psychosis).

After completing a PhD and Master of Psychology (Clinical) at UNSW in 2019, Daniel accepted a post-doctoral position at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, where he worked on projects investigating the influence of perceptual and cognitive capacity on attention and stimulus detection. Daniel has been working at UNSW since 2020 and current projects are focused on understanding why reward-related stimuli (e.g., stimuli related to money, drugs, and desirable food) capture our attention and influence behaviour.