Dr Elliot Freeman

Senior Lecturer; Undergraduate Admissions Tutor

Department of Psychology

E: Elliot.Freeman.1@city.ac.uk
T: +44 (0)20 7040 0102

Overview

Dr Freeman's doctoral training was at Bristol University, where in 1998 he gained a PhD in Psychology. He then worked as a postdoctoral research fellow, in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, until 2007.

During that period he travelled to the Weizmann Institute in Israel and to the Smith-Kettlewell Institute in San Francisco.

After his postdoctoral training, he worked for two years teaching Research Methods at Brunel University, before taking his present post as lecturer here at City University London in 2009.

Research interests

In his early research Dr Freeman developed a paradigm for investigating how attention and task demands can influence visual contour integration, a fundamental process by which the visual brain integrates its fragmentary input into global forms. His theme has since broadened to studying how the brain resolves the interpretation of ambiguous stimuli, according to the context in which they are encountered. He has found that such context interactions can be gated (effectively switched on or off) by voluntary goal-directed attention, sometimes with dramatic consequences for subjective awareness.

More recently Dr Freeman has been studying contextual interactions between different modalities, such as vision and hearing. For example, he has discovered that the pure timing of auditory events can influence the perceived direction of ambiguous visual apparent motion. He has also been involved in collaborations on numerical cognition, for example examining interactions between the processing of time, number and space.

His methods are primarily behavioural (psychophysics), but he has also worked on projects involving fMRI, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and EEG.

He is happy to supervise student projects on attention, vision and crossmodal (e.g. audiovisual) integration.

Teaching

• Cognitive psychology PS2002 & PS2003
• Research methods PS2001

Selected publications

• Cappelletti, M., Lee, H.L., Freeman, E.D. Price, C.J. (2010). The role of the right and left parietal lobes in the conceptual processing of numbers. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22 (2).
• Cappelletti, M., Freeman, E.D., Cipolotti, L. (2009). Interactions and dissociations between time, numerosity and space processing. Neuropsychologia 7(13), 2732-2748.
• Freeman E, Verghese P (2009). Peeling Plaids Apart: Context Counteracts Cross-Orientation Contrast Masking. PLoS ONE 4(12): e8123. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008123.
• Freeman, E., Driver, J. (2008). Direction of visual apparent motion driven solely by timing of a static sound. Current Biology 18 (16), 1262-1266.
• Freeman, E., Driver, J. (2008). Voluntary control of long-range motion integration via selective attention to context. Journal of Vision 8 (11), 1-22.
• Cappelletti, M., Freeman ,E.D., Cipolotti, L. (2007). The middle house or the middle floor: Bisecting horizontal and vertical mental number lines in neglect. Neuropsychologia 45 (13), 2989-3000. 
• Freeman, E.D., Driver, J. (2006). Subjective appearance of ambiguous structure-from-motion can be driven by objective switches of a separate less ambiguous context. Vision Research 46 (23), 4007-4023.
• Khoe, W., Freeman, E., Woldorff, M.G., Mangun, G.R. (2006). Interactions between attention and perceptual grouping in human visual cortex. Brain Research 1078 (1), 101-111.
• Khoe, W., Freeman, E., Woldorff, M.G., Mangun, G.R. (2006). Longer latency effects of attention on integrative processes in early visual areas. Brain Research 1078 (1), 101-111.
• Ruff, C.C., Blankenburg, F., Bjoertomt, O., Bestmann, S., Freeman, E., Haynes, J-D.,Rees, G., Josephs, O., Deichmann, R., Driver, J. (2006). Concurrent TMS-fMRI and psychophysics reveal frontal influences on human retinotopic visual cortex. Current Biology 16 (15), 1479-1488. 
• Freeman, E., Driver, J. (2005). Task-dependent modulation of target-flanker lateral interactions in vision. Perception and Psychophysics 67(4), pp.624-637.
• Freeman,E. (2005). Lateral interactions between targets and flankers require attention. in Itti,L., Rees,G., Tsotsos,J. (ed.) Neurobiology of Attention. Academic Press/Elsevier, 447-484. 
• Freeman, E., Sagi, D., Driver, J. (2004). Configuration-specific attentional modulation of flanker-target lateral interactions. Perception 33 (2), pp.181-194.
• Khoe, W., Freeman, E., Woldorff, M.G., Mangun, G.R. (2004). Electrophysiological correlates of lateral interactions in human observation of a visual cortex. Vision Research 44 (14), pp.1659-1673. 
• Freeman, E., Driver, J., Sagi, D., Zhaoping, L. (2003). Top-down modulation of lateral interactions in early vision: Does attention affect integration of the whole or just perception of the parts? Current Biology 13 (11), pp.985-989.
• Driver, J., Davis, G., Russell, C., Turatto, M., Freeman, E. (2002). Segmentation, attention and phenomenal visual objects. in Scholl,B. (ed.) Objects and Attention. MIT Press.
• Freeman, E., Sagi, D., Driver, J. (2002). Psychophysical measurement of attention modulation in low-level vision using the lateral-interactions paradigm. in Cantoni, M, Marinaro, M, Petrosino, A (ed.) Visual Attention Mechanisms. Plenum Press, 25-40. 
• Driver, J., Davis, G., Russell, C., Turatto, M., Freeman, E. (2001). Segmentation, attention and phenomenal visual objects. Cognition 80 (1-2), pp.61-95.
• Freeman, E., Sagi, D., Driver, J. (2001). Lateral interactions between targets and flankers in low-level vision depend on attention to the flankers. Nature Neuroscience 4 (10), pp.1032-1036.