Question: what inspiered you to do scince and why are you doing this particular studdy

Paul Matusz answered on 5 Nov 2018:

I started studying psychology as I thought it’s interesting to understand the mechanisms that lead us to think the way we do, how we develop as we grow older, and how these mechanisms go wrong to create different disorders, like ADHD, dementia etc.
The more I studied psychology, the more things I found interesting. There has always been a motive of “how we process information REALLY, in everyday situations” throughout my research training. I became interested in how people – adults and children – attend to information that is emotionally “loaded” – that is positive (like smiling faces) or indicates threat (like angry or fearful faces), and how attention to these object differ to very simple (coloured bars, flashes of light) objects that most theories of attention are based on. This took me to another type of a “salient” stimulus category – multisensory stimuli, those that engage most of our senses at once. I designed a project for my PhD to study how adults pay attention to visual and audiovisual information, and how we can learn about this topic by record electrical activity from the brain, using for example EEG – electroencephalography. After my PhD , I became interested where we can using this knowledge and go interested in how kids differently pay attention to multisensory information. From then on, I have been working on attention and learning with multisensory information, how we can use EEG to understanding these processes better, and how this can be relevant to how people, children and adult alike, learn in natural environments, like classroom or the office. I wrote a blog post on how we learn in everyday situations, like classroom, where information stimulates many of our sense – have a look https://bold.expert/learning-occurs-in-multisensory-environments/ . On that blog there are many more interesting posts about how we learn and how studying the brain is useful to understand these processes better. 🙂
I’m doing this particular type of research as I think that if we understand how we learn and pay attention in everyday situations, then we can design better ways to learn – at school, for everyone – but also design better rehabilitation program for children with dyslexia or dyscalculia, or ADHD – but also kids that don’t see or hear very well. So I’m doing my research to help people realise their potential 🙂