Vision

The distracting power of colorful food

Have you ever noticed that restaurants often advertise their food with vibrant, bright colors—highlighting every juicy morsel of the meal? The reasoning is simple: colorful photography makes the food more appetizing and makes us (the viewer) more likely to buy it. Some believe that this type of advertising even contributes to overeating habits when marketing […]

Continue Reading

A bright approach to eye movement analysis: Tools for studying the saccade main sequence

We’ll start this one off with a trivia question (and perhaps a bad joke). What do astronomers and researchers who study eye movements have in common? For one, they both have a keen interest in orbits! The other thing they have in common? When describing eye movements, vision researchers use a term that’s actually borrowed […]

Continue Reading

Knocking a longstanding theory of distance perception

Once upon a time, Kepler and Descartes proposed that vergence is the critical absolute distance cue. And that theory lived happily ever after. Until Paul Linton‘s paper. In this podcast, I interview Paul (pictured below) about his work published in the Psychonomic Society journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics.  Learn about longstanding theories and Linton’s research […]

Continue Reading

When THREE or 3 makes 3 harder to RSVP: Negative priming in rapid serial visual presentation

William James famously said that the world is “one great blooming, buzzing confusion” to an infant whose sensory apparatus is “assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once.” As adults, we continue to be assailed by stimuli, but out attentional apparatus permits us to deal with the blooming and buzzing confusion quite well. […]

Continue Reading

Being fooled (or not) by Hyperrealistic masks: When “Five blimps” can reveal the Dark Knight

In October 2010, an elderly white man boarded an Air Canada flight bound from Hong Kong to Vancouver. During the flight, this passenger visited the bathroom and emerged an Asian man in his early 20s. No, this wasn’t an episode of Scooby Doo, this was an actual case where a hyperrealistic mask was used to […]

Continue Reading

When a flash a memory makes: Memorability of pictures in an RSVP task

What is it we remember, and why? Research in cognitive psychology has provided a broad and often very reliable sketch of the variables that determine memory performance. For example, recall of words is better when word repetitions are spaced rather than massed. To learn the Lithuanian word for cookie, you are better off spreading apart […]

Continue Reading

Looking at Toto or Kansas: The Tyranny of Film versus Top-Down Cognition

What are your favorite, best-ever movie quotes? Is it “I’ll have what she’s having”? Or “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore”? What about “This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”? If you are unsure, here is a list of the best 100 movie quotes of all time according to Hollywood. But […]

Continue Reading

Open but not rugged: The awe-inspiring vastness of the Nullarbor

Have you ever experienced “vastness”? Have you driven across a vast expanse of space that stretches from horizon to horizon seemingly without limit? If not, then I can recommend the Australian Nullarbor (pronounced “null-ah-bore”), the treeless arid expanse of red soil and scrubs in between Eucla in Western Australia and Ceduna in South Australia. It […]

Continue Reading