Dr. Dock H. Duncan is a postdoctoral researcher in the department of experimental and applied psychology and the Institute for Brain and Behaviour Amsterdam working in the research group of Prof. Jan Theeuwes. Dr. Duncan’s research focuses on the role of learning and experience on attention. Specifically, Dr. Duncan's research focuses on how patterns in our environment affect attentional deployment, directing attention towards likely target locations and away from likely distractor locations. This mechanism is thought to play a key role in molding our attention system to effectively interact with our environment, allowing us to effortlessly effectively maneuver around the complex worlds we live in. Dr. Duncan’s PhD Thesis, titled ‘The Mind is a River: The Neuro-Cognitive Factors Underlying Attentional Guidance by Task Regularities” was awarded the Dissertation Prize at the biennial Dutch Psychonomics Society's Winter Conference (2025).
Dr. Duncan has additionally been awarded the Rubicon grant by the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO) to continue his current research line in collaboration with Dr. Clayton Hickey and Prof Ole Jensen at the Universities of Birmingham and Oxford respectively. In this project, Dr. Duncan will study the influence of past experiences on attentional deployment with a focus on the neural locus of history effects using concurrent EEG and fMRI as well as the application of rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT)
In addition to his Research, Dr. Duncan was an organizing member of the Object Perception, Attention and Working Memory Conference (2024-2025) organized as an annual part of the American Psychonomics Society meeting. Dr. Duncan’s research has been published in journals including Nature Communication, the Journal of Neuroscience, the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, and many others. Dr. Duncan has additionally presented his work at a wide range of academic conferences including the Vision Science Society (VSS), Psychonomics Society, European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP), and the Dutch Society For Brain And Cognition Winter Conference (NVP). Before beginning his PhD at VU, Dr. Duncan completed an MSc. at the University of Utrecht under the supervision of Prof. Stefan van der Stigchel.
