Edward Vogel, Ph.D. is Professor in the Department of Psychology and The College. He is a Member of the Grossman Institute for Neuroscience, Quantitative Biology, and Human Behavior.

Vogel received a BA in Psychology from University of Puget Sound and a Ph.D. in Pyschology from University of Iowa. He completed his dissertation in the lab of Steven J. Luck. Vogel held a postdoctoral research position at the Institute for Neural Computation at University of California, San Diego.

Prior to UChicago, Vogel held faculty appointments in the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Neuroscience at University of Oregon.

The Vogel laboratory examines the operation of visual attention and working memory in humans using a variety of neuroscience techniques. These cognitive mechanisms appear to be a central “online workspace” in the brain for an organism to achieve a variety of goals in its immediate environment. Over the years, the lab has demonstrated that these mechanisms are highly capacity limited and that these capacity limits vary systematically across individuals. Within healthy populations, these individual differences in capacity predict performance on a wide swath of intelligence and academic aptitude measures. Further, the Vogel lab and others have shown that capacity is greatly reduced for individuals with a many psychiatric and neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, Schizophrenia, and Prefrontal damage. Thus, by developing a comprehensive model of the neurophysiology and cognitive mechanisms underlying attention and working memory, the lab may gain some insight into the nature of intelligent thought and the cognitive deficits associated with numerous mental disorders.

Attention, memory capacity, individual differences in cognition, neural measures of working memory