How might a road tell you what to expect, and would this keep everyone who uses it safer? Since it’s probably a bad idea to have the road start to talk to drivers, cyclists and pedestrians, how should we design it so that everyone who uses it can do so safely? This question has interested […]
Attention
Sometimes, it seems like the most simple tasks are also the most frustrating. Take the junk drawer in your kitchen, for example. They’re in every home, we’re not proud of them, and whenever we spend several minutes looking for the vegetable peeler when cooking dinner, we promise ourselves that one day, we will get this […]
The title of this post is “How are aware remote operators of autonomous vehicles?” According to a new paper by Mutzenich, Durant, Helman, and Dalton (pictured below) published in the Psychonomic Society journal Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, the answer is: we don’t know. One of the points of the paper is to urge researchers to […]
As many office workers transitioned to working from home last year, there has been an unprecedented rise in the number of pet adoptions. And as any dog or cat owner will attest, caring for a pet comes with many challenges. Your cat might block your view of your computer screen all day, but when it’s […]
Although the human experience is truly a unique one, it’s comforting to know that we all share some experiences and emotions. For example, we were all excited the day we were handed our very first motor vehicle driver’s license. You know, the one with the awkward smile and terrible lighting. When we first received our […]
One recommendation to reduce COVID-19 transmission is to keep a distance of at least 2 meters/6 feet from others. If you are a pedestrian making your way through busy city streets, this advice is easier said than done. There’s a lot to keep track of to maintain distance with people coming from different directions and […]
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 […]