The Adam Lab is a cognitive neuroscience lab at UC Davis studying Attention, Distractions, And Memory.
Fluctuations of attention and memory
Our attention fluctuates from moment to moment, and we all have experiences of these fluctuations in our everyday lives. You might be focused one minute but staring out the window with a blank mind the next. The ADAM lab is interested in how fluctuations of attention impact working memory performance. In our work, we have found that participants frequently "lapse" during an ongoing working memory task, and we have used modeling and EEG approaches to pinpoint the neural mechanisms that underlie these failures (Adam et al. 2015; 2018). Our data support a model of working memory in which most individuals share a common capacity limit (e.g. 3 simple features) but differ in how consistently they achieve this maximum capacity (Adam et al., 2015; 2018; Adam, Vogel, & Awh, 2017). We are also studying whether participants are self-aware of these failures (Kozlova, Adam & Fukuda 2025; Adam & Vogel 2017), and how practice and performance feedback may be used to reduce the rate of these attention failures (Kozlova & Adam, pre-print 2025, Adam & Vogel, 2016).
Learning to ignore irrelevant distractors
Because of a limited processing capacity, we can only pay attention to a small amount of information at any moment. Usually, we can use our goals to focus on finding only the relevant information in a visual scene. However, despite our best intentions, we can sometimes get pulled off track when salient but irrelevant information is present. The ADAM lab is interested in how we can learn to ignore initially salient information with experience. Using fMRI in conjunction with a visual search task, we have demonstrated how our past experiences shape our current attentional priorities. We found that repeated distractors modulated canonically stimulus-driven sensory responses to create a temporally-integrated representation of attentional priority (Adam & Serences, 2021). In recent and ongoing work, we are unpacking how attentional capture dynamically varies over time (Adam et al. 2024).
New approaches to studying working memory in the brain
A third arm of work in the ADAM lab is focused on the behavioral and neural measurement of visual working memory. For example, researchers commonly use correlational approaches to investigate the relationship between different cognitive processes, but internal reliability critically limits the usefulness of correlational approaches. In a large study with up to 31 experimental sessions per participant and ~300,000 total trials, we characterized the reliability and stability of visual working memory capacity over time (Xu*, Adam*, Fang & Vogel, 2016). Using this large sample, we used iterative downsampling to demonstrate the impact of both trial- and sample-size on estimates of reliability and we quantified the impact of extensive practice on stability. In further work, we demonstrated how power issues related to trial-counts have important consequences in other areas of the literature such as psychopharmacology (Adam, Doss, Pabon, Vogel & de Wit, 2020). In the realm of neural measurement, we have developed methods for using the multivariate EEG signal to predict trial-by-trial working memory load (>250 participants and >250,000 trials; Adam, Vogel & Awh, 2020; Thyer et al. 2022).