Karla K. Evans
Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor)

Profile

Biography

• University of Trieste, Italy Bsc(Hons), Experimental Psychology (1998)

• Princeton University, USA MA, Cognitive Psychology (2004)

• Princeton University, USA PhD, Cognitive Psychology (2007)

Career

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Postdoctoral fellow, (2007-2008)
• Harvard Medical School, Postdoctoral fellow, (2008-2013)
• Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Postdoctoral Scholar, (2008-2013)
• University of York, Lecturer in Psychology, (2013- ) 

Departmental roles

Psychology Department Athena Swan Committee

University roles

Athena Swan working group, Psychology representative

Research

Overview

My work centres on understanding how capacity limited sensory systems integrate different sources of information to produce a coherent percept of the world. My areas of research include attention, visual cognition and memory, multimodal perception and translational interdisciplinary work. I use a variety of techniques in my research such as psychophysics, FMRI, EEG and eye tracking.

Projects

• Role and nature of non-selective processing in visual awareness
• Cross-modal audio-visual integration and search
• Expertise in perception
• Medical Image perception
• Role of context in visual recognition memory

Research group(s)

• Perception and Action (Vision group)
• Cognition and Communication (Attention, Learning & Memory group)

Grants

• 2009-2012 Individual Ruth Kirschstein-NRSA Postdoctoral grant 

Collaborators

• Jeremy M. Wolfe (Harvard Medical School)
• Anne Treisman (Princeton University)
• Tamarra Haygood (University of Texas)
• Sang Chul Chon (Yonsen University)
• David Fencsik (California State University, East Bay)

Publications

Selected publications

• Evans, K.K.,Georgian-Smith D., Tambouret R. , Birdwell, R. L., & Wolfe Wolfe J.M. (2013) The Gist of the Abnormal: Above chance medical decision making in the blink of an eye. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (DOI) 10.3758/s13423-013-0459-3
• Evans, K. K., Birdwell, R. L., & Wolfe, J. M. (2013). If You Don’t Find It Often, You Often Don’t Find It: Why Some Cancers Are Missed in Breast Cancer Screening. PloS one, 8(5), e64366.
• Drew T., Evans K.K., Vo M., Jacobson F. & Wolfe J.M. (2013) What can you see in a single glance and how does this guide visual search? RadioGraphics 33, 263-274.
• Evans K.K. & Chong S., (2012) Distributed Attention and Its Implication For Visual Perception. In Wolfe, J.M., Robertson, L. (Eds.) Attention and Beyond: Searching through the papers of Anne Treisman. NY: Oxford University Press.
• Evans K.K., Evered A., Tambouret R.H., Wilbur D.C. & Wolfe J.M. (2011) Prevalence of Abnormalities Influences Cytologists’ Error Rates in Screening for Cervical Cancer.  Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, 135(12), 1557-1560.
• Evans, K.K., Horowitz, T. & Wolfe, J.M. (2011) When Categories Collide: Accumulation of Information About Multiple Categories in Rapid Scene Perception. Psychological Science, 22 (6), 739 – 746.
• Wolfe J.M., L-H Vo, M., Evans K. K. & Greene, M.R. (2011) Visual search in scenes involves selective and non selective pathways. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15(2), 77-84.
• Cohen, M., Evans, K.K., Horowitz, T. & Wolfe, J.M. (2011) Auditory Recognition Memory is Inferior to Visual Recognition Memory in Musicians. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 18(3), 586-591.
• Evans, K.K., Horowitz, T., Howe, P., Pedersini, R., Reijnen, E., Pinto, Y., & Wolfe, J. (2011) Visual Attention, In L. Nadel (Ed.), Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2(5), 503-514
• Evans, K. K., & Treisman, A. (2010). Natural cross-modal mappings between visual and auditory features. Journal of Vision, 10(1):6, 1-12.
• Evans, K.K., Cohen, M., Tambouret, R., Horowitz, T., Kreindel, E. & Wolfe, J.M. (2010) Does Visual Expertise Improve Visual Recognition Memory? Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 73 (1), 30-35.
• Chong S. & Evans K.K., (2010) Focused v. Distributed Attention (count v. estimate), In L. Nadel (Ed.), Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science Published online 23 Dec. 2010
• Todorov, A., Gobbini, M.I., Evans, K. K., Haxby, J.V. (2007) Spontaneous Retrieval of Affective Person Knowledge in Face Perception. Neuropsychologia, 45 (1), 163-173
• Evans K.K. & Treisman A., (2005) Perception of objects in natural scenes; is it really attention-free? Journal of Experimental Psychology; Human Perception and Performance, 31 (6), 1476-1492.
• Awater H., Kerlin J. R., Evans K.K. & Tong F. (2005) Cortical representation of space around the blind spot. Journal of Neurophysiology, 94, 3314-3324.

Full publications list

See the York Research Database for list of publications. 

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Research Methods and Statistics Year 1 & 2 (Mini Projects)

External activities

Memberships

• Psychonomic Society
• Vision Science Society
• American Psychological Society
• Cognitive Neuroscience Society
• Advancing Science, Serving Society

Editorial duties

• Ad hoc reviewer of various in Journals in vision, attention and neuroscience
• NIH grant review panel on Basic Behavioral Research on Multisensory Processing