Paul Seli

Pickering, Ontario
Psychology
Trent University Oshawa
Symons Medal Winner

The pursuit of knowledge has always been of great importance to Trent University Oshawa Psychology graduate, Paul Seli. This passion for the acquisition and sharing of knowledge brought Paul much success during his time as an undergraduate student at Trent.

Attributing much of his academic success to the intimate environment of Trent in Oshawa, Paul also recognizes the important role his professors, and mentors, have played. According to Paul, one Oshawa professor in particular, Dr. Ben Bauer, helped develop Paul’s desire to conduct and pursue further research and encourage him to think critically about science.

“Trent has helped prepare me for the future by providing me with skills that are necessary for furthering my academic career. While at Trent, I learned how to acquire and integrate knowledge, conduct experiments, analyze data, and most importantly, I learned how to think critically,” Paul says, adding, “My relationship with Professor Bauer played a critical role in my academic journey. He inspired me, guided me, and took me under his wing.”

Reflecting back on his academic program, Paul says he enjoyed pursuing and completing his honours thesis most of all. His research project studied and tested Feature Integration Theory, a theory of visual attention and perception that proposes that, without focused attention, the individual features of an object will be unbound and we may incorrectly bind features of separate objects together.

“I investigated how different features of an object are bound together so as to allow for a unified percept of that object. My results challenged the necessity of focused attention for feature binding,” Paul explains. “Although these results did not definitively falsify Feature Integration Theory, I have plans for follow-up research that will potentially provide an alternative explanation for our ability to bind features without focused attention.”

Paul’s plans to continue his research will lead him to graduate school in the fall. Before taking the next step in his academic career however, Paul will celebrate his success with his fellow students at Convocation, where he will be presented with the Symons Medal for academic excellence.