Associate Professor

Department of Psychology

North Dakota State University

Fargo, ND 58108-6050

Office: 316K Minard Hall

Phone: (701) 231-6731

Email: Robert.D.Gordon@ndsu.edu

Education

1993 B.Sc., Psychology, University of Alberta

1995 M.A., Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

1999 Ph.D., Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Research Interests

My research focuses on mental representations of objects and scenes, and the role attention plays in developing those representations. It is known that people form a representation of a scene very quickly; even if a scene is presented for just a single fixation (250-350 milliseconds), people can usually report the scene category (e.g., kitchen, classroom), and can often report the identities of several objects within the scene. My recent research focuses on the processing that allows people to derive this representation so efficiently. I also investigate the short-term representations of objects that people develop as they interact with those objects; such temporary representations seem to play an important functional role in the comprehension of changing environments, and in the integration of visual information derived from successive fixations on a scene.

Courses Taught

PSYC 350: Research Methods I

PSYC 460: Sensation and Perception

Representative Publications

Sun, M., & Gordon, R. D.  (2010). The influence of location and visual features on visual object memory.  Memory and Cognition, 38, 1049-1057.

Gordon, R. D., & Vollmer, S. D.  (2010).  Transsaccadic representation of diagnostic and non-diagnostic object color.  Visual Cognition, 18, 728-750.