John M. Henderson
John Henderson studies how meaning guides attention as people view complex scenes. He directed the University of South Carolina’s Institute for Mind and Brain in 2012. At UC Davis, he and Taylor R. Hayes developed meaning maps for scene attention; those maps informed a 2024 infant-attention study, and in 2025 he coauthored DeepMeaning, a vision-language transformer that estimates scene meaning and predicts gaze. As of October 2026, he leads a UC Davis Psychology lab on dynamic scene viewing and serves as contact principal investigator for an NIH award on real-world scene attention.
- Works
- 437
- Citations
- 21,715
- h-index
- 74
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.
Timeline
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2012
Leading USC’s mind institute
He directs the University of South Carolina’s new Institute for Mind and Brain as it launches in 2012. The institute brings together 18 faculty members to study attention, perception, language and other higher brain functions.
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2017
Meaning maps for attention
In 2017, he and Taylor R. Hayes develop meaning maps that represent the semantic richness of scene regions and find that meaning accounts for unique variance in viewers’ attention.
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2018
Scene description and image AI
In 2018, he and three coauthors test how meaning and image salience guide attention during real-world scene description, then discuss implications for artificial-intelligence methods that label images.
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2024
Meaning maps and infant attention
Lisa Oakes uses meaning maps Henderson developed at UC Davis in a study of where infants look, comparing scene meaning with physical salience.
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2025
DeepMeaning and vision-language models
In 2025, he coauthors DeepMeaning, which uses a vision-language transformer trained on billions of image-text pairs to estimate local scene meaning, predict where people look, and offer language-based interpretations.
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As of October 2026
Leading a UC Davis lab
As of October 2026, he leads a UC Davis Psychology lab studying how adults view complex dynamic scenes and allocate attention. He serves as contact principal investigator for the FY2026 NIH award “Guiding Attention in Real-World Scenes,” administered by UC Davis.
Sources and credits
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- UofSC Launches Institute for Mind and Brain
- Meaning-Based Guidance of Attention in Scenes as Revealed by Meaning Maps
- Meaning Guides Attention during Real-World Scene Description
- Babies Attend to Clues of Meaning as They Take in Complex Visual World
- DeepMeaning: Estimating and Interpreting Scene Meaning for Attention Using a Vision-Language Transformer
- UC Davis hiring Junior Specialist- Henderson Lab
- John M Henderson | NIH Award Records | ConductScience