Assistant Professor Jacob Fisher is a researcher at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and media psychology. He was one of 23 scholars nationwide chosen for the 2024 Google Cloud Research Innovators cohort, a program that supports researchers using Google Cloud services to tackle real-world problems.

“It’s a game that I can use to study how people pay attention, how people multitask, how people switch their goals back and forth between different tasks in this sort of motivating and engaging context,” Fisher said. By pairing gameplay data with functional neuroimaging, he’s investigating how the brain’s network efficiency changes during demanding tasks — and how those changes might differ in people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

This work fills crucial gaps in both ADHD research and in media psychology. Fisher’s study is among the first to test both cognitive and perceptual load in the same naturalistic environment, and to actually link those behavioral differences to what’s happening in the brain. His team’s findings contribute to a growing body of evidence suggesting that ADHD-related differences in cognitive function and behavior aren’t fixed, but shift depending on task design.