Projects

In the Vision Lab (co-directed by Dr. Simona Buetti and Dr. Alejandro Lleras), we are interested in understanding fundamental mechanisms in vision and attention, broadly construed.

The main line of investigation in the Vision Lab focuses on characterizing the contribution of parallel peripheral vision to our rich sense of the world.

We focused on analyzing performance in very simple visual search tasks to illustrate that there is a surprisingly large amount of information that can be successfully extracted in parallel from peripheral vision. However, extracting this information takes time, so analysis of the temporal variability in these tasks allows us to identify the underlying mechanisms of parallel peripheral vision. In this project, we use a combination of psychophysical methods, computational modeling, eye-tracking, and EEG.

In relation to this work, our lab was awarded a 2019 research grant from the NSF Behavioral and Cognitive Science grant (1921735). Title: CompCog: Template Contrast and Saliency (TCAS) Toolbox: a tool to visualize parallel attentive evaluation of scenes (PI: Simona Buetti).