- Professor, Psychology
- Professor, Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences
Research Interests
- Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention; Formal Models of Cognition
Education
- Post-doctoral Fellowship, John B. Pierce Laboratory and Yale University
- Ph.D., New School for Social Research
Dr. Melara measures the psychophysical (signal detection, reaction time) and electrophysiological (event-related potentials) activity of human participants as they perform tasks of visual, auditory, or cross-modal selective attention (i.e., making cognitive decisions within distracting environments).The goal of his research is to develop formal models of human attentional systems, models that explicitly link on-line physiological processing to momentary behavioral performance. His current research interests include investigations of cognitive decline in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy and the loss of inhibitory control in patients diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).