Daniel Pearson

Dr Daniel Pearson serves as a Research Associate at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) within the School of Psychology under the Faculty of Science. His cognitive psychology research investigates how learned experiences shape perception, selective attention, and cognitive control, with applications in real-world alert design and understanding psychopathology.

Research interests focus on the cognitive and neural mechanisms of visual cognition, particularly how reward-related stimuli (money, drugs, food) capture attention and influence behavior. His work bridges theoretical cognitive science with clinical applications, examining interactions between attention to reward cues and conditions like substance use disorders and psychosis.

Publications reveal consistent exploration of value-modulated attentional capture, reward learning, and attentional suppression mechanisms. His research demonstrates how reward history persistently influences visual attention even after outcome devaluation, with implications for addiction treatment and human-computer interaction design.

Current projects examine why reward-related stimuli capture attention, building on postdoctoral work at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience where he studied perceptual capacity's impact on attention. His methodology frequently employs eye-tracking to measure overt attentional selection in visual search tasks.