Theeuwes Attention Lab

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Jan Theeuwes is a cognitive psychologist who studies how people select, remember, and act on information in complex visual environments. His research focuses on visual attention, working memory, emotion, eye movements, and the application of attention research to real-world problems such as road design, signage, and traffic safety.

His work uses a variety of methods, including behavioural experiments, eye tracking, EEG and event-related potentials, neuroimaging, and computational approaches. A central goal of his research is to understand how attention determines what we see, what we ignore, what we remember, and how visual information guides behaviour.

Much of his research has focused on attentional selection: how salient objects capture attention, how people search for relevant information, and how learning and experience shape what is prioritized. In addition to this fundamental work, he is interested in how these mechanisms operate in applied settings, especially in traffic environments where attention, perception, and decision making are critical for safety.

Jan Theeuwes has also contributed to the development of tools for scientific research. Together with Sebastiaan Mathôt and Daniel Schreij, he launched OpenSesame in 2012, an open-source graphical experiment builder called OPEN SESAME that is now used worldwide for designing and running behavioural experiments. The software has become a widely used standard tool for building experiments in psychology and cognitive science