Staff & Faculty Directory

Robert Alexander

Assistant Professor; Psychology & Counseling, College of Arts & Sciences

Education Credentials: Ph.D.

Expertise: Human Factors and Behavioral Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Medical Image Perception, Expertise and Training, Measuring Human Performance, Sensation and Perception, Human Vision

Joined New York Tech: 2023

Robert G. Alexander is an award-winning cognitive neuroscientist with over 15 years of experience in vision research. Alexander received a Ph.D. in cognitive science from Stony Brook University in 2013. In 2014, he became a full-time research faculty member at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University. In 2022, he co-founded Expertize, Inc., a C Corporation startup created to develop educational tools and oculomotor biomarkers of expertise. He has worked with several companies to develop technologies and products based on discoveries from his research. Some of the resulting intellectual property has been successfully sold and commercialized. He has also authored dozens of peer-reviewed publications, including papers in Nature Human Behaviour, Radiology, The Journal of Neuroscience, Scientific Reports, and Behavioral Research Methods.

At New York Tech, Alexander leads a research team—the Human Factors and Neuroscience lab—that asks what we can learn about people from the way they move their eyes. Most of this research examines perceptual expertise in healthcare and other professional contexts. We can tell how much of an expert someone is, just from the way they look at images. For example, expert radiologists look at potentially cancerous nodules much more quickly than medical students do. When piloting an aircraft, too, experts quickly look at the right places, at the right times. The research team collects eye movement measurements and then uses this data to create educational training and assessment tools that help students learn how to look at images the way that experts do.

As described in New York Tech Magazine, Alexander prioritizes student involvement in all aspects of the research, Students on the research team participate in designing experiments, setting up data acquisition systems, creating stimuli, collecting and analyzing data, preparing and authoring manuscripts, and presenting their discoveries at conferences. Many of Alexander’s undergraduate student trainees have continued to pursue graduate or medical degrees.

He has also engaged in scholarship of learning projects focused on inequalities in education and has examined best practices in science communication. Alexander has explored how best to present factual scientific information, and how scientists can fight against misinformation and disinformation. Alexander is also Vice President for the Americas of the International Society for Clinical Eye Tracking.

  • Improving Undergraduate Research Education Designing and testing system-level interventions that increase access, quality, and equity in undergraduate research, developing sustainable pipelines for federally competitive student scholarship. Sub-projects focus on support structures and long-term mentorship scaffolds across disciplines. One such project was selected as the inaugural Psi Chi NICER project, launching a regional initiative to assess a teaching intervention in research courses throughout the eastern United States.
  • National Institutes of Health R16 (GM159810): The Effects of Cue Precision on Medical Imaging Interpretation. Role: PI. Assessing whether precise cues guide eye movements during radiological search more efficiently than imprecise cues. 
  • National Institutes of Health R01 (CA258021): Novel Perceptual and Oculomotor Heuristics for Enhancing Radiologic Performance. Role: Co-I. Investigating how expert radiologists leverage visual texture and peripheral vision to detect abnormalities. The project integrates psychophysics, eye-tracking, and deep learning to model expertise and build scalable training paradigms for radiology residents.
  • Perceptual Expertise in Complex Systems Examining how professionals in high-stakes environments (including radiology) view complex scenes. Findings inform the development of training and assessment systems across fields requiring visual expertise.
  • Psychophysics of Visual Sampling Exploring how eye movements shape the way we process visual information, with implications for understanding pathology and designing diagnostic tools. 

Patents
  • System and Method for Inter-Individual Discrimination Based on Oculomotor Kinematics (co-inventor). US Patent No. 11,880,441, published Jan 23, 2024.
Peer-reviewed Journal Articles
  • Alexander, R. G., Venkatakrishnan, A., Chanovas, J., Ferguson, S., Macknik, S.L., & Martinez-Conde, S. (2024). “Why did Rubens add a parrot to Titian’s “Fall of Man”? A pictorial manipulation of joint attention.” Journal of Vision.
  • Dunn, M.J., Alexander, R.G., Amiebenomo, O.M. et al. Minimal reporting guideline for research involving eye tracking (2023 edition). Behav Res (2023). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02187-1
  • Alexander, R. G., Waite, S., Bruno, M., Krupinski, E. A., Berlin, L., Macknik, S. L., & Martinez-Conde, S. (2022). “Mandating limits on workload, duty, and speed in radiology.” Radiology, 304(2), 274–282.
  • Phelps, A.M., Alexander, R. G., & Schmidt, J. (2022). “Negative cues minimize visual search specificity effects.” Vision Research, 196.
  • Alexander, R. G., Macknik, S. L., & Martinez-Conde, S. (2022). “What the neuroscience and psychology of magic reveal about misinformation.” Publications, 10(4), 33.
  • Alexander, R. G., Mintz, R. J., Custodio, P. J., Macknik, S. L., Vaziri, AF., Venkatakrishnan, A., Gindina, S., & Martinez-Conde, S. (2021). “Gaze mechanisms enabling the detection of faint stars in the night sky.” European Journal of Neuroscience, 00, 1–11.
  • Alexander, R. G., Venkatakrishnan, A., Chanovas, J., Macknik, S.L., & Martinez-Conde, S. (2021). “Microsaccade dynamics mediate perceptual alternations in Monet’s ‘Impression, Sunrise.'” Scientific Reports, 11, 3612.
  • Alexander, R. G., Yazdanie, F., Waite, S., Kolla, S., Chaudhry, Z.A., Macknik, S. L., & Martinez-Conde, S. (2021). “Visual illusions in radiology: untrue perceptions in medical images and their implications for diagnostic accuracy.” Frontiers in Neuroscience, 15(554).
  • Alexander, K. E., & Alexander, R. G. (2021). “Evidence of weight bias in the college classroom: a call for inclusive teaching practices for students of all sizes.” College Teaching, 70(4), 461–468.
  • Alexander, R. G., Waite, S., Macknik, S. L., & Martinez-Conde, S. (2020). “What do radiologists look for? The future and limitations of perceptual learning in radiologic search.” Journal of Vision. 20(10), 1–13.
  • Alexander, R. G., Macknik, S. L., & Martinez-Conde, S. (2020). “Microsaccades in applied environments: Real-world applications of fixational eye movement measurements.” Journal of Eye Movement Research, 12(6).
  • Waite, S., Farooq, Z., Grigorian, A., Sistrom, C., Kolla, S., Mancuso, A., Martinez-Conde, S., Alexander, R. G., Kantor, A., & Macknik, S. L. (2020). “A Review of Perceptual Expertise in Radiology—How it develops, how we can test it, and why humans still matter in the era of Artificial Intelligence.” Academic Radiology, 27(1), 26–38.
  • Martinez-Conde, S. & Alexander, R. G. (2019). “A gaze bias in the mind’s eye.” Nature Human Behaviour, 3(5), 424–425.
  • Macknik, S.L., Alexander, R. G., Caballero, O., Chanovas, J., Nielsen, K.J., Nishimura, N., Schaffer, C.B., Slovin, H., Babayoff, A., Barak, R., Tang, S., Ju, N., Yazdan-Shahmorad, A., Alonso, J-M., Malinskiy, E., Martinez-Conde, S. (2019). “Advanced circuit and cellular imaging methods in non-human primates.” Journal of Neuroscience, 39(42), 8267–8274.

Downloads of these publications are available on the HFAN lab webpage.

View a full list of citations at Google Scholar

  • Elected Fellow of the Psychonomic Society, 2025
  • Co-Investigator for National Institutes of Health research grant R01-CA258021, 2021–2025.
  • Faculty Mentor for a 2024–2025 Psi Chi Fall Undergraduate Research Grant, “Quantifying Radiologic Search Behaviors.” Student Principal Investigator: Ola Abozid.
  • Faculty Mentor for a 2024–2025 Psi Chi Fall Undergraduate Research Grant, “Examining the Effects of Focused Meditation on Visual Perception.” Student Principal Investigator: Amy Patel.
  • Awarded a New York Tech Institutional Support for Research and Creativity grant, 2024.
  • Supervisor of the Year from New York Tech Student Employment, 2024.
  • Faculty Mentor for a 2023–2024 Psi Chi Fall Undergraduate Research Grant, “Search Cues In Radiology.” Student Principal Investigator: Ola Abozid.
  • Awarded Best Scientific Paper of the Year by AuntMinnie.com (the radiology field’s premier medical imaging news and information site), out of over 50,000 articles published the preceding year, 2022.
  • Sensory Neuroscience Editor’s Pick 2021 (frontiersin.org) – Top Ten Cited and Downloaded, 2021.
  • Received assessment of “exceptionally good review” from Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, 2016.
  • Stony Brook Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (URECA) Research Program award (Role: Mentor), 2011.
  • The Rosemarie Ungarelli Memorial Award in Psychology for “outstanding” departmental service, 2006.
  • The Richard P. Runyon Award in Psychology for “superior” departmental service, 2006.

  • PSYC 101: Introduction to Psychology
  • PSYC 251: Measurement Concepts
  • PSYC 270: Cognitive Psychology
  • PSYC 310: Abnormal Psychology
  • PSYC 335: Personnel Psychology
  • PSYC 410: Physiological Basis of Behavior
  • PSYC 483: Supervised Research in Psychology III

Contact Information

Email: ralexa04@nyit.edu

Office: New York, NY