Dr. Wieske van Zoest

• Bsc & Msc, Maastricht University, the Netherlands
• Phd, VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Wieske van Zoest completed her Bsc and Msc degree in Psychology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands; her Msc thesis was completed at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

From 2001- 2005 she worked on a PhD with Mieke Donk and Jan Theeuwes at the VU University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Supported by post-doctoral fellowships of NWO (Rubicon) and Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research she spent three years at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver Canada working with Alan Kingstone, Jim Enns and Jason Barton. In 2008 she was awarded a NWO veni grant and returned to the VU University Amsterdam.

In 2011 Wieske moved to Italy to the University of Trento to work as an assistant professor at the Center for Mind/ Brain Sciences. In September 2018 Wieske started a position as lecturer at the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham.

Module coordinator for ‘Introduction to Neuroscientific Methods’ for master students.

Wieske is currently working with Claudia Bonmassar (phd-student) at the Center for Mind/ Brain Sciences at the University of Trento.

Wieske is always interested in talking to potential students (masters or phds) and postdoctoral fellows. Please do not hesitate to contact her via w.vanzoest@bham.ac.uk.

For more information see https://sites.google.com/site/wieskevanzoest

A main question in Wieske’s work is how people select those things in the environment that they want to select and why is it that sometimes certain things and objects automatically draw attention and eyes. Using a modified visual search paradigm and eye movement recordings, Wieske has demonstrated an important role for time in determining how much control observers have available. For example, when observers respond quickly, salient stimuli are prioritized in processing regardless of their task relevance. However, as time passes salience degrades and the representation changes. It becomes more sophisticated as other information, such as prior knowledge and observer goals, is integrated.

In her work, Wieske has discovered that search and selection performance 1) depends on the amount of time observers take to deploy attention and move their eye movements to a location; 2) does not always depend on observers’ awareness; 3) depends on whether there is a relation of symmetry between a target and surrounding elements; 4) benefits from a short-term visual memory representation, and 5) is automatically modulated by random reward feedback.

Other interests of Wieske include visual search, spatial cueing of attention via gaze-direction or arrows, eye movements and reward, shared task representation in joint attention, and individual differences looking at how special populations such as hearing-impaired and deaf individuals process incoming visual information.

ORCID: 0000-0001-6760-2346