Vince Polito is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia and a former Associate Investigator of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders. His PhD research won the Ernest Hilgard Award for the best thesis on hypnosis from the American Psychological Association and his work has been profiled by Buzzfeed, Nine News, ABC News24 and many others.

His research investigates cognitive and neurological changes in altered states of consciousness. He has investigated attentional capacities in meditation, psychiatric symptoms of disturbed control, states of flow in expertise, hypnotic suggestions, and body representation alterations in virtual reality. He is particularly interested in how beliefs and expectations shape psychedelic experiences and conducted one of the first systematic observational studies of the effects of microdosing in healthy participants.