Professor Hopfinger (Department of Psychology and Neuroscience) specializes in cognitive psychology and perception. One focus of his research has been the investigation of the neural consequences of reflexive, or automatic, shifts of visual attention (in other words, the type of attention that is at work when something suddenly captures your attention, despite your intentions). A second line of research has been to gain a more temporally precise and anatomically specific understanding of human attention systems, through the development of a multi-methodological approach that combines event-related potentials with neuroimaging methods including positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Finally, a third, more recent line of research has involved the investigation of mechanisms of top-down attentional control, and is aimed at understanding the cognitive neural architecture of executive attentional processes.