kira at gwu dot edu

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Hi! I'm a researcher in cognitive neuroscience at George Washington University.

My dissertation research focuses on semantic guidance of audiovisual attention: how the meaningful relationships between sounds and images shape our attention in real world scenes.

I'm additionally interested in the underlying neural mechanisms of semantic understanding and crossmodal attention processing.

More broadly, I'm passionate about how data can provide insight into human behavior and improve lives.

Publications also available on Google Scholar.

* = equal contributions

Work in preparation

Wegner-Clemens, K., Kravitz, D.J, Shomstein, S. Task irrelevance guidance of attention in audiovisual semantic relationships.

McEvoy, K.*, Wegner-Clemens, K.*, Auer, E., Eberhardt, S., Bernstein, L., Shomstein, S. Covert attention modulates visual speech perception independent of eye position.

Nag, S.*, Mahableshwarkar, P.*, Wegner-Clemens, K., Cox, P., Kaplan, S., Teng, C., Kravitz, D., Mitroff, S. Efficiencies of online data collection.

Bean, S., Wegner-Clemens, K., Shomstein, S., Malcolm, G.L. Semantically congruous sounds draw and hold gaze on objects across different scene backgrounds.

Wegner-Clemens, K., Malcolm, G., Shomstein, Search efficiency scales with audiovisual semantic relatedness in a continuous manner.

2024

Wegner-Clemens, K., Malcolm, G. L., Shomstein, S. (2024) Predicting attention in real-world environments: the need to investigate crossmodal semantic guidance. WIRES Cognitive Science. (link)

2022

Wegner-Clemens, K., Malcolm, G. L., Shomstein, S. (2022) How much is a cow like a meow? A novel database of human judgements of audiovisual semantic relatedness. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. ( link; preprint )

2020

Magnotti, J.F., Dzeda, K.B., Wegner-Clemens, K., Rennig, J., & Beauchamp, M.S. (2020). Weak observer-level correlation and strong stimulus-level correlation between the McGurk effect and audiovisual speech-in-noise: a causal inference explanation. Cortex. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2020.10.002 (pdf; link)

Wegner-Clemens, K., Rennig, J., & Beauchamp, M.S. (2020) A relationship between Autism-Spectrum Quotient and face viewing behavior in 98 participants. PLoS ONE 15(4): e0230866. (pdf; link)

2019

Wegner-Clemens K, Rennig J, Magnotti JF, Beauchamp MS. (2019) Using principal components analysis to characterize eye movement fixation patterns during face viewing. Journal of Vision, November 2019, Vol.19, 2. doi:10.1167/19.13.2 (pdf; link)

Rennig, J., Wegner-Clemens, K., & Beauchamp, M.S. (2019) Face Viewing Behavior Predicts Multisensory Gain During Speech Perception. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 27, 70–77(2020) ( pdf; link)

Convento, S., Wegner-Clemens, K. A., & Yau, J. M. (2019). Reciprocal Interactions Between Audition and Touch in Flutter Frequency Perception, Multisensory Research, 32(1), 67-85. (pdf; link)

Semantic guidance of audiovisual attention

What we know about the world shapes how we attend to and percieve it.

How meaningful sounds can modulate visual attentional priority is essential to understanding attention in complex real world scenes, as (reviewed here!)

I used online data collection techniques (javascript, AWS servers, mTurk) to:

- create a freely available database of semantic relatedness values based on human judgements

- demonstrate that a sound's semantic relationship to the target predicts visual search speeds (preprint available).

- investigate the importance of task relevance (ongoing work)

Understanding eye gaze and audiovisual speech perception

Faces are extremely important and common visual objects, meaning they might be attended differently. In particularly noisy environments, visual information from the mouth can be crucial to understanding speech.

I have contributed to several projects investigating face and speech perception:

- using PCA to analyze gaze behavior (1)

- investigating the role of eye movements in speech perception (1, 2)

- how face viewing behavior relates to social/behavioral traits (1).

- the relationship between attention, face viewing preferences, and speech perception (manuscript in prep)