Psychology Professor, Daniel Smilek
This past week, we were luck enough to interview Psychology Professor, Daniel Smilek. Dr. Smilek is known for his extensive research in Cognitive Neuroscience, and his Physiological Psychology class. Read on to learn a little more about one of our amazing faculty members;
1. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in the Czech Republic back when it was still a communist country. My parents didn’t agree with communism so we escaped to Austria. A year later we moved to Canada, in the Mississauga area.
2. Where did you go to school?
I did my undergrad at McMaster, Masters and PhD at Waterloo, and my post-doc at UBC.
3. What classes are you currently teaching?
Currently, I’m teaching Psych 261 and a graduate course on attention and mind-wandering. I’m also in the process of designing a revamped version of the online PSYCH 261 course. It’s cool to focus on just one course because there’s a lot of literature for one topic.
4. Did you always want to be a professor?
No. In high school, I wanted to go into biology research or something in that industry. More and more, as I did research, I realized I enjoyed doing research and teaching. I really enjoy working in teams with students and other researchers. My favourite thing is collaborating on projects, and the idea that you can always be working with new things and testing theories. You can slake your curiosity. Get curious about things, design an experiment, and find the answer.
5. What was your inspiration/motivation to do your phD?
As an undergraduate at McMaster, several different things came together. Early on, I just happened to be browsing through the bookstore and came across a book written by Richard Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, which is about synesthesia. My Intro to Psychology course got me very interested in the field of Psychology. For my independent studies and honours thesis, I got to work with some very interesting people; Larry Jacoby on memory, and Bruce Milliken who fanned the flames of my interest in Psychology.
6. Can you give us a brief summary of the areas of your research?
Currently my main area of focus is with regard to how we pay attention to things, what happens in the mind when you pay attention, when you’re trying to but can’t, and under what conditions you can sustain attention over time. I hope to see how well they can pay attention as time unfolds. Other related areas that I study are Media Multitasking and how this impacts performance on tasks, and Mind Wandering by specifically looking at how it happens. I’m also working with a grad student on the peak attention focus – we call flow – which is to be so fully focused on a task that time just passes by without you noticing it. Previously, I spent a lot of time focusing on visual attention and synesthesia.
7. Is there a way that students can get involved in his lab?
We always have quite a few undergraduate volunteers in the lab, teamed up with a graduate student. We have a few students doing independent studies and honours thesis work. We’re very fortunate we have great undergraduate students and some of the undergraduates will go on to stay for graduate school with us.
8. How much time do you devote to your research?
A lot – it’s hard to put a number on it given that it’s primary thing that I do. I’m always doing it with students, volunteers, and it’s hard to distinguish between research time and teaching time. Even when we’re collecting data in a lab, i’m teaching and collaborating with students on the research. The two are very closely tied together.
9. What other Psych department classes do you recommend students to take?
Psych 207 (Cognition) and Psych 307 (Human Neuropsychology) which is a follow-up to PSYCH 261. Make sure you get your stats and research methods courses in – those are fundamental across the board. If you can, get started on writing about research and take some programming (computer science) courses, those will be really helpful. A lot of our experiments are done on computers today, and you want to be able to make and design your own experiments. Data analysis requires an understanding of coding, and you might not think about these skills as much.
We also had a few quick questions for Dr. Smilek:
What is your coffee order?
I take it black. In the afternoon I try to drink tea to limit my caffeine intake, but sometimes I lose track of time and need a second cup of coffee in the afternoon. It’s actually not good to drink Coffee in the afternoon though, as I talk about in my PSYCH 261 class.
What is your favorite part of the brain?
I would have to say it’s the visual cortex. I really like visual processing and vision, we know quite a lot about the visual cortex, it’s perhaps the best understood out of all the senses.
If you’re interested in getting to know more about Dr.Smilek and his research, he can be reached at dsmilek@uwaterloo.ca. Or if you’re interested in his lab, follow this link; https://uwaterloo.ca/vision-attention-lab/people-profiles/dr-daniel-smilek