Education

• Ph.D., Cognitive Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1988
• M.S., Cognitive Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1986
• B.S., Psychology, Summa cum Laude, 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, and an affiliate of the Center for Neuroscience. He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, and the Psychonomic Society.

Research Focus

Professor Henderson’s research program 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, 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. He uses a variety of methods including eyetracking, neuroimaging, 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.
• Ramey, M. M., Yonelinas, A., & Henderson, J. M. (2024). How schema knowledge influences memory in older adults: Filling in the gaps, or leading memory astray? Cognition, 250, 105826.
• Upadhyayula, A., & Henderson, J. M. (2023). Spatiotemporal jump detection during continuous film viewing. Journal of Vision, 23, 13.
• 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.
• 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.
• Desai, R. H., Choi, W., Lai, V., & Henderson, J. M. (2016). Towards semantics in the wild: Activation to manipulable nouns in naturalistic reading. Journal of Neuroscience, 36(14), 4050-4055.
• Henderson, J. M. (2011). Eye movements and scene perception. In S. Liversedge, I. D. Gilchrist and S. Everling (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Eye Movements (pp. 593-606). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• 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 the undergraduate course PSC 131 (Perception).

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.