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 […]
Features and Objects
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 […]
If you’re like me, you’ve been busy trying out new hobbies in the last couple of years. Maybe you’ve taken up gardening, sculpting, hiking, or knitting. Or perhaps you’ve taken up a more unusual one: competitive duck herding, extreme ironing, ostrich racing, or worm charming. (Yes, these are all real activities!). But before you run […]
In my post to begin FIT week, I gave my account of the beginnings of my interest in Anne Treisman’s work and in her Feature Integration Theory (FIT). She had hypotheses about the relationship between preattentive features and early cortical processing that I wanted to challenge. As part of that project, since I had not […]
All animals need to search their environment – for food, for predators, for mates. When humans search for a specific target, the target often pops out from the background. For example, in the image below, the fish is obviously different than the people. No matter how many people were present, the fish would always be […]
Whether it be in media reports, articles, or apps on our phones, we encounter graphical depictions of critical information. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, media outlets have relied on various graphical depictions to convey critical information. Consider the graph below from the NY Times showing the change in spending between 2019 and 2020, […]
It all comes down to objects. How does the visual system manage to establish and maintain representations of objects in the world, despite almost constant change in input with shifts of the head and eyes, change in the urgency of different goals, and change in the objects themselves? It’s crazy, really, that it can be […]
Imagine I flash you an image of an animal in a savannah scene, say an elephant. You briefly view the image, and then you are asked to report its content while referring to specific details such as the type of animal and its position in the scene (e.g., was it facing the right or the […]
Anne Treisman’s most important contribution to science is her feature integration theory of visual attention, which is arguably one of the most important works in the history of cognitive psychology and visual science. In brief, this theory proposed a two-level model. Preattentive features are extracted in parallel in the early visual system so that the […]
I once asked Anne Treisman, my Ph.D. supervisor, how and when I could get my Ph.D. Anne told me that I will get it once I learn all the good things from her and establish something of my own. This meant that I must learn everything about focused attention then find something new. Considering the […]