John M. Henderson

John M. Henderson Portrait

Distinguished Professor

Young Hall

Education

  • Ph.D., Cognitive Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1988
  • M.S., Cognitive Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1986
  • B.S., Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1983

About

In addition to his academic appointment in Psychology, John Henderson is a core member of the Center for Mind and Brain, a member of the Center for Vision Science, an affiliate of the Center for Neuroscience, and a member of the Plasticity and Memory Program at UC Davis. He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, and the Psychonomic Society, and is a member of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, the Visions Sciences Society, and the Society for the Neurobiology of Language.

Research Focus

Professor Henderson investigates how information about the visual world is acquired, identified, retained in memory and manipulated by the cognitive system to support thought and to guide behavior. His research focuses on the nature of the representations and processes involved in scene perception and reading, including visual selective attention (both covert and overt), visual recognition and representation, visual short- and long-term memory, and the interaction of cognition and perception. His current work highlights the role of semantics in the control of visual attention. He uses a variety of methods including eyetracking, neuroimaging, brain stimulation and computational modeling.

Lab

Visual Cognition Lab (Henderson)

Representative Publications

  • Oakes, L. M., Hayes, T. R., Klotz, S. M., Pomaranski, K. I., & Henderson, J. M. (2024). The role of local meaning in infants' fixations of natural scenes. Infancy, 29(2), 284-298.
  • Rehrig, G., Hayes, T. R., Henderson, J. M., & Ferreira, F. (2023). Visual attention during seeing for speaking in healthy aging. Psychology and Aging, 38(1), 49.
  • Peacock, C. E., Hall, E. H., & Henderson, J. M. (2023). Objects are selected for attention based upon meaning during passive scene viewing. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 30(5), 1874-1886.
  • Ramey, M. M., Henderson, J. M., & Yonelinas, A. P. (2022). Episodic memory processes modulate how schema knowledge is used in spatial memory decisions. Cognition, 225, 105111.
  • Kiat, J., Hayes, T. R., Henderson, J. M., & Luck, S. J. (2022). Rapid extraction of the spatial distribution of physical saliency and semantic informativeness from natural scenes in the human brain. Journal of Neuroscience, 42(1), 97-108.
  • Hayes, T. R., & Henderson, J. M. (2021). Looking for semantic similarity: What a vector space model of semantics can tell us about attention in real-world scenes. Psychological Science, 32(8), 1262–1270.
  • Ramey, M. M., Henderson, J. M., & Yonelinas, A. P. (2020). The spatial distribution of attention predicts familiarity strength during encoding and retrieval. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149(11), 2046.
  • Henderson, J. M., & Hayes, T. R. (2017). Meaning-based guidance of attention in scenes as revealed by meaning maps. Nature Human Behaviour, 1, 743-747.
  • Henderson, J. M. (2017). Gaze control as prediction. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(1), 15-23.
  • Nuthmann, A., Smith, T. J., Engbert, T., & Henderson, J. M. (2010). CRISP: A computational model of fixation durations in scene viewing. Psychological Review, 117, 382-405.
  • Torralba, A., Oliva, A., Castelhano, M. S., & Henderson, J. M. (2006). Contextual guidance of eye movements and attention in real-world scenes: The role of global features in object search. Psychological Review, 113, 766-786.

Teaching

Professor Henderson teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the areas of cognitive psychology and cognitive science, with a focus on visual cognition. He regularly teaches PSC 131 (Perception) in the Fall quarter.

Awards

In 2017, Professor Henderson's 2006 Psychological Review paper with Antonio Torralba, Aude Oliva, and Monica Castelhano was named by Google Scholar Classics as the #1 paper in cognitive science for the period of 2006-2016.

Professor Henderson's research is currently funded by grants from the National Eye Institute and the National Science Foundation.