Whether you are an air traffic controller, a transportation security officer, a gamer, a student studying for finals, a writer trying to meet a deadline, or a parent, the ability to maintain attention for extended periods without getting distracted can be crucial. However, as many humans have experienced, sustaining attention to a task, especially one […]
Attention
Search in the lab doesn’t look like search in the world (mostly) Visual search is something that we do all the time – in the morning, pre-coffee, you might stumble into the washroom and look for your toothbrush (hoping that your cat didn’t get rambunctious in the night and knock it into the sink), followed […]
Have you ever played one of those candy jar guessing games where the goal is to accurately estimate how many candies are inside to win them all? As a kid, I always tried my hardest to guess correctly because my mom rarely let me have candy. No matter how hard I tried, my guesses were […]
I hate going grocery shopping, so when I go to the supermarket, I usually have a shopping list and try to quickly find what I want in the sea of grocery objects on each aisle to finish as soon as possible. I guess I’ve got better at this over the years, but I still don’t […]
When I’m trying to focus on reading scientific articles, my eyes keep drifting to my phone beside me—even when it’s face-down, on silent. No notifications, no vibrations, nothing calling for my attention … yet, I still look. Once I stash it in a desk drawer and it is out of sight, I can successfully focus […]
I had never given much thought to the saying that “the eyes are the window to the soul” until I watched the TV show, Fleabag. Without giving too much away (although, honestly, this paragraph will probably be a major spoiler), the show follows a woman who regularly breaks the fourth wall, where she looks away […]
Many of us have collected things at some point in our lives, whether it’s coins, records, CDs, or stuffed animals. You might be surprised by the range of weird and wonderful things that people like to collect. Some examples I’ve seen around the internet include sugar packets, traffic cones, and umbrella covers. Visually, collections are […]
The “same or different” concept is something we all learned as a child. We were shown two images and asked if they were the same or different. This activity teaches us to compare objects in the world; it introduces critical thinking and has applications in mathematics. The same/different task has also been used in visual […]
Now you don’t see me, and now you still don’t see me: Detecting movie skips using a flicker paradigm
In the past I’ve been accused of various forms of laziness—not taking advantage of a beautiful day, whiling away my childhood, not studying for my next test, whiling away my adolescence, not writing my dissertation, whiling away my 20s, 30s, etc.—when really I’ve been hard at work watching TV and movies. That the optimal method […]
Unfortunately for me, one of the first things I see most mornings is an ad. It’s largely my fault—I have the extremely terrible habit of keeping my phone next to me at night and then an arguably worse habit of checking Twitter (excuse me, X) in the morning, leading me to inevitably scroll past an […]