For Balota, it's the mind that matters

David Balota, Ph.D., works to unlock the secrets of the subconscious

David A. Balota, Ph.D. (right), discusses free will with freshman Vikas Kotagal at a pizza lunch for students in the Hewlett Mind-Brain Program.

David A. Balota, Ph.D. professor and associate chair of psychology in Arts and Sciences, has spent much of his career exploring the subtle cognitive mechanics of the human mind.

It is the mind's ability to control and focus its attention that lies at the heart of Balota's research and teaching interests, and it is the millisecond -- one one-thousandth of a second -- that figures prominently in his efforts to unlock the secrets of our feverishly churning, rapid-fire subconscious minds.

Balota knows, for instance, that readers of this sentence do not process words as a steady, continuous stream, but instead scan groups of words in a series of short glimpses that are processed separately. He also knows that readers are functionally blind for about 20 milliseconds as they shift their gaze from one phrase to the next.

Balota and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts capitalized on this quirk of human perception with experiments that use sophisticated eye monitors to detect the onset of gaze shifts as readers scan computer-displayed sentences; they then make instantaneous changes in the next word to be read, all during the reader's fleeting milliseconds of blindness. Readers never consciously notice the word change, but most glean some vague awareness of the initially displayed word as they subconsciously read ahead using peripheral vision.

"Reading is just one example of the human mind's amazing ability to process information at an unconscious level," Balota said. "At any point in time, you have lots of things that are impinging on you and vying for your attention. How the middle toe on your left foot feels in your shoe. The sensation of your back against a chair. The brain is constantly dealing with all these stimuli, but you're never conscious of them unless you direct your attention."

Subliminal messages

In his studies of the power of subliminal processing, Balota presents subjects with a 15millisecondglimpse of a visually camouflaged word, such as CAT. Participants claim no awareness that a word or anything else has been presented, but follow-up responses reveal that the subconscious mind actually begins processing these "invisible" words, leaving the unwitting participants highly primed to recognize a subsequently presented and closely related word, such as DOG.

While Balota's research confirms these subliminal effects, it also shows the effects are short-lived and have little influence on future behavior.

"This is actually bad news for learning Spanish while sleeping or advertisers who think they can change sales via subliminal messages," Balota said. "It appears that in large part attention is needed to lay down memory traces."

In more recent studies, Balota has begun to shed light on one of the most salient problems in Alzheimer's research -- how the disease influences a person's ability to acquire and retrieve memories.

The mind, Balota explained, stores memories of events and other knowledge in intricate webs linked by logical, semantic associations; a thought or other stimulus can spark a reaction along these networks and cause a flood of information to be activated. The ability to maintain attention is critical to the memory process because the mind must constantly weigh and choose among these streams of information, focusing on what's relevant and discarding the rest.

"Our findings suggest that memory problems associated with aging are not the result of a broad general decline in all memory-related functions, but are due to sharp declines in some cognitive areas, specifically portions of the brain that control attention and the strategic processing of information once it is recalled from memory," he said.

A native St. Louisan, Balota conducted his first research on human learning as an undergraduate at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL). The first from his immediate family to attend college, he is the son of a construction worker, a pipe coverer who died eight years ago from asbestos-related cancer.

"My father consistently reminded me that I did not want to follow in his footsteps and the best way to ensure that was a college education," Balota said.

Balota took the advice to heart. Intrigued by a course on philosophy of the mind and his readings of Descartes, he majored in psychology and minored in philosophy, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1976. In an UMSL research lab he met Janet Duchek, another psychology major from St. Louis and his future wife. Shared interests led them to the University of South Carolina, where both earned master's and doctoral degrees in psychology.

Duchek is now an associate professor of occupational therapy at the medical school, and the couple continues to collaborate, both on research and in raising their two children. Daughter Angela, 17, attends University City High School, and son Joseph, 10, attends Jackson Park Elementary.

David Balota takes the plunge during a bungee-jumping adventure in New Zealand.

The family enjoys traveling, skiing, fishing and other adventures, including a recent father-daughter bungee jump in New Zealand. Balota also is a die-hard fan of the St. Louis Cardinals and Rams.

Balota coaches his children's soccer teams as well, and his graduate students sometimes volunteer to help. Jason Watson, a current student, has been helping for three years. Dan Spieler, a 1997 doctoral graduate, assisted for a couple of seasons.

"It was sort of scary," said Spieler, now an assistant psychology professor at Stanford University. "I found him doing the same things while he was coaching these kids in soccer that he was doing with grad students in his labs. Neither started out knowing much, but he gave us all the same good-natured encouragement. He prods relentlessly, but it never seems like he's working you hard. The further I go in this field, the more I realize what an amazing mentor he was."

Balota's people skills did not come easily. As a graduate student teaching his first course at South Carolina, Balota was crestfallen when his students returned less-than-stellar evaluations. In the dogged style that is now his trademark, he responded by taping each subsequent lecture and cajoling his faculty mentor, Randy Engle, into providing weekly critiques of his lecture style.

"I was impressed that he wanted so much to become a good teacher that he invested a great deal of time and energy to improve his teaching," said Engle, now chair of psychology at Georgia Institute of Technology. "As a consequence, he is an outstanding teacher, and his research talks are renowned for their clarity and the ease with which he gives them."

Balota's persistence has helped him excel not only in teaching and research, but also in administration. Martha Storandt, Ph.D., professor of psychology and a long-time research colleague, described Balota as a "triple threat."

"He's a fantastic researcher who trains his students to be great researchers," Storandt said, "but he's also a workhorse in his administrative duties with the department. He doesn't like to be thought of as an administrator, but he's very effective and efficient at it."

Balota has been associate chair of psychology since 1996, a period in which the department moved into a new $28 million building and added 10 faculty. He also has served on the steering committee for the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology (PNP) Program; as chair of the Linguistics Program; and as coordinator of the Cognitive Science Interdisciplinary Research Group.

He is currently active in the Hewlett Mind-Brain Program, a new undergraduate curriculum that exposes freshman to two years of intensive cross-disciplinary study in matters of the mind.

Teaching abroad

Balota joined the faculty here in 1985 and became a full professor of psychology in 1995. He added a second appointment in 1996 as professor of neurology in the medical school. His time here has included stints as a scholar at leading psychological institutes in The Netherlands and as the Erskine Distinguished Professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Although he collaborates often with world-class researchers, Balota also enjoys working with newcomers. His work with a former undergraduate student, Jason Zevin, will soon be published as a co-authored article in a leading journal. For five years, he has worked with students from local high schools to complete research as part of the National Science Foundation's Young Scholars Program.

"I want to turn my students on to the science of understanding the mind, and I want the public to understand more about the exciting research that's currently going on thi this area of psychology," Balota said. "We're in the midst of a very exciting time for the science of the mind. I'd like to make it a little less mysterious for everyone."