Sean Noah - Starting Fall 2026
Assistant Professor
Pronouns: he, him, his
Contact Information
- Office:
- Phone:
- Email: slnoah@calpoly.edu
Education
- Postdoctoral Researcher, University of California, Berkeley
- Ph.D., Psychology, University of California, Davis
- B.A., Cognitive Science & Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of California, Berkeley
Research Interests
My research focuses on perceptual consciousness, including using causal manipulations (e.g., psychoactive compounds) to probe mechanisms. I investigate how perceptual experience emerges from dynamic interactions among sensory cortex, top-down control systems, and internal models of the world. I’m especially interested in active processes that shape conscious perception, such as attention and inference.
In particular, three areas of my focus are:
- Selective attention and neural dynamics: EEG decoding and computational analyses of how attended and ignored object representations evolve in the brain.
- Perceptual multistability: neural mechanisms of perceptual selection and maintenance.
- Psychedelic perception: combining neuroimaging, behavior, and qualitative text analysis (NLP/LLMs) of subjective reports to map perceptual effects of psychedelic substances.
Selected Publication
Noah, S., Shen, M., Erowid, E., Erowid, F., & Silver, M. (2025). A novel method for quantitative analysis of subjective experience reports: application to psychedelic visual experiences. Frontiers in Psychology.
Noah, S., Meyyappan, S., Ding, M., & Mangun, G. R. (2026). Rhythmic sampling and competition of target and distractor representations in visual sensory memory. Cerebral Cortex.
Bressler, D., Noah, S., Lu, A., & Silver, M. (2026). Double dissociation of the effects of volitional control on perceptual selection and maintenance in multistable visual perception. Journal of Vision.
Noah, S., & Mangun, G. R. (2020). Recent evidence that attention is necessary, but not sufficient, for conscious perception. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.