Craig Chapman

Craig Chapman studies how the brain makes decisions that allow people to successfully navigate their world, targeting relevant objects for action and ignoring or avoiding irrelevant ones.

These decisions play an essential role in healthy living, but often fall below conscious awareness. Chapman asks what is the added value of consciousness, and what does it mean for non-conscious decision processing to play such a strong role. The question suggests an important blurring of the distinction between the conscious and the non-conscious. In his lab, Chapman uses a detailed analysis of sensorimotor processing that integrates eye-tracking, electroencephalography and motion-tracking. This has shown that a decision about making a movement doesn’t end once the movement is initiated, but continues until the movement is complete. Therefore, movements provide a window into deciding and thinking, and movement recording is a powerful research tool for science and a diagnostic tool for medicine.

Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship
NSERC Canadian Graduate Scholarship – Doctoral
NSERC Canadian Graduate Scholarship – Master’s

Pesquita, A., Chapman, C.S., & Enns, J.T. (2016). Humans are sensitive to attention control when predicting others’ actions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(31), 8669-8674. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1601872113

Chapman, C.S., Gallivan, S. Wong, J.P., et al. (2015). The snooze of lose: Rapid reaching reveals that losses are processed more slowly than gains. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 144(4), 844-863. 

Gallivan, J.P., & Chapman, C.S. (2014). Three-dimensional reach trajectories as a probe of real-time decision-making between multiple competing targets. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 8, 1–19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2014.00215

Chapman, C.S., Gallivan, J.P., Culham, J.C., & Goodale, M.A. (2011). Mental Blocks: fMRI reveals top-down modulation of early visual cortex when obstacles interfere with grasp planning. Neuropsychologia, 49(7), 1703-17. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.02.048

Chapman, C.S., Gallivan, J.P., Wood, D.K.,...& Goodale, M.A. (2010). Reaching for the unknown: Multiple target encoding and real-time decision-making in a rapid reach task. Cognition, 116(2), 168–76.