Alejandro Lleras received his Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University in 2002. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia until 2004. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and a part-time faculty member in the Beckman Institute Human Perception and Performance group. His main areas of interest are on visual awareness, visual attention, vision for action, and high-level constraints on visual perception.

NSF Researcher Starter Grant (2005); Dean of Arts Travel Award, University of British Columbia (2004); NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2003); Beckman Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship (2002); William L. and Josephine Berry Weiss Graduate Scholarship (2001-2002); Bruce V. Moore Graduate Fellowship (2001); Eileen Wirtshafter Leibowitz and Herschel W. Leibowitz Scholarship (2000, 2001); College of the Liberal Arts Travel Grant, Pennsylvania State University (2001).

Professor Lleras' larger research program is aimed at addressing a fundamental question in perception: how is it that our mind creates representations of objects in the physical world? In one area of his research, he examines what role various factors play in the creation and "maintenance" of these representations (i.e., when the represented objects change in physical characteristics, such as shape and location). He will also study how those representations ultimately give rise to perceptual awareness of the physical object and/or to overt motor responses. A second line of research focuses on how visual attention influences perception. Whereas most assume that visual attention "helps" perception, there are several important cases where, in fact, attention to an object might hinder the perception of this object (Troxler Fading) or of other salient events in the world (Inattentional Blindness). Furthermore, because visual attention does tend to help perception in many cases, Lleras is also interested in understanding what factors, internal or external to the observer, affect the deployment of attention. Lastly, he is interested in investigating how higher-level factors such as memory, task strategies, and expectancies affect perception.

As part of his Beckman Institute research, Lleras is currently collaborating with other Beckman Faculty (professors Wang, Kramer, Irwin, and Simons) on two projects in the fully immersive CUBE. The first project is aimed at understanding whether Inhibition of Return effects (reluctance to return to a previously searched location) play a role in foraging behavior. They are also examining how the task-determined values (relevance) of locations affect foraging. In a second project, they are examining how memory for objects is affected by the stability of the environment in which they exist. Lastly, Lleras is collaborating with Dan Simons in a series of scene-fading studies, where they have managed to rapidly induce the visual fading of natural scenes. Together, these studies are revealing new and unforeseen properties of the human visual system.