Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo -- Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1
Behavioural Neuroscience
B.Sc. (Trent) MA, PhD (Concordia)
Phone: 519-888-4567 x32877
Fax: 519-746-8631
Office: PAS 4035
email: mjdixon@watarts.uwaterloo.ca
One focus of my research has been to understand synaesthesia. In synaesthesia ordinary stimuli lead to extraordinary experiences. For example when shown standard black digits or letters synaesthetes experience highly specific colours. For example when the synaesthete C is shown a black 7 she experiences the 7 with a yellow coloured overlay. We have shown that these synaesthetic colours are highly consistent (for C 7 is always yellow), and cannot be voluntarily controlled (i.e.,when shown a 7 she cannot help but experience this yellow overlay atop the 7). We have also shown that there are important individual differences between synaesthetes. "Projector" synaesthetes experience colours "out there, on the page", whereas associator synaesthetes experience their colours in their mind's eye. Although most of our research has been on grapheme-colour synaesthesia, we have also begun to conduct research on time-space synaesthesia where time units such as days of the week, or months of the year are synaesthetically linked to specific locations in space (For the time space synaesthete E. , January is 30 degrees to the left, April is straight ahead). We have shown that presenting month names to time-space synaesthetes causes them to orient their attention to these specific locations in space. To learn more about synaesthesia and our research on this fascinating topic please consult our synaesthesia web page. Another focus of my research has been to understand how we recognize objects, and how brain damage can cause category specific agnosia: a selective recognition impairment for things like fruits and vegetables, with a sparing of recognition for objects like tools and furniture. Although much of this research involved a case study approach, recently I have successfully applied the paradigms I developed with single patients to groups of people suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Studying people with problems like category specific agnosia and conditions like synaesthesia can often provide important clues about how certain fundamental processes like object recognition work in healthy individuals. Athird line of research involves investigating gambling behaviour. Specifically we have looked at asome of the features of slot machines that make them so alluring, and for a small set of the population so addictive.
Jump to - UW Department of Psychology - UWinfo