Please allow me to introduce you to our newest Digital Associate Editor, Anna Kosovicheva (pictured below). Anna joined the Psychonomic Society’s Digital Content Team just this year. In this capacity, she will play a role in many of our activities, including covering some of the latest research that fills the pages of the Society’s journals.
Given Anna’s creative, modern, and humorous take on classic perceptual examples, I, for one, am excited to read Anna’s coverage of our members’ research. Below, see those examples, and learn more about her exciting research on visual perception, thoughts on our unsolved mysteries of cognitive science, and more. Her first post, written with Ben Wolfe (whose interview is coming soon), will appear later this week – be sure to check it out. Beforehand, head over to Twitter and follow @ankosov.
Without further ado, here’s Anna!
What’s your area of research?
I study visual perception, with an emphasis on visual space perception and binocular vision. To interact with a dynamic world, it’s important for us to accurately perceive spatial information (for example, the location of a baseball flying through the air). There are many factors that come into play here, and I study the mechanisms of how we process this spatial information and use it to guide action. I’m also interested in taking tools and methods that we use to study basic perceptual functions in normally-sighted populations and applying them to populations with visual impairments.
I co-direct the Applied Perception and Psychophysics LaboratorY (or APPLY) at the University of Toronto Mississauga, together with Benjamin Wolfe. Our lab examines a broad range of basic and applied topics in vision, including driving, legibility, eye movements, and peripheral vision.
What’s the most exciting concept in cognitive science?
What excites me about cognitive science, and perception in particular, is that we can learn a lot from our errors. It’s not a new idea, but it’s what drew me to the field in the first place. The failures in perception and cognition can teach us a lot about how these processes normally work. Vision scientists love illusions because they’re great at illustrating the assumptions we make. For example, size illusions like the one below can tell us about the cues we use to interpret depth (in this case, we have strong linear perspective cues).
What’s the most critical unsolved challenge or unanswered question for cognitive scientists?
There are so many! I think an important challenge for cognitive scientists is understanding how we each perceive the world differently, and why. We only have access to our own perceptual experience, so it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that we don’t always agree about what we see. There are a lot of great examples that show this pretty clearly—for example, there’s #TheDress that created a lot of disagreements a few years ago, or the Yanny/Laurel clip for an auditory example.
When we talk about cognitive or perceptual phenomena, we tend to focus on averages, or things that are common among many individuals. However, I think there’s been a lot of interest in recent years in understanding the basis of some of the differences between individuals. The most challenging part is figuring out how these differences fit into our general understanding of perceptual mechanisms: how are we different, how do these differences arise, and what do they mean?
What drew you to science communication?
For me, it’s a natural outgrowth of my love of outreach and showing off vision demos. I’m always eager to share my enthusiasm for vision science, and one of my favorite things about this field is that you can experience so many different phenomena for yourself. Motion aftereffects, face inversion effects, and color constancy are all great examples.
Visual illusions have a ‘wow’ factor when people see them for the first time, but again, they’re not just tricks or random errors in vision. They teach us a lot about how we interpret visual information. Being able to experience these things firsthand is my favorite part, so I’m always looking for ways to illustrate or explain sensory phenomena in ways that we can all readily appreciate.
Is there anything else you want us to know about you?
The start of this year brought about many changes! Aside from joining the Psychonomics Digital Content team, I just moved to Canada from the US to start my new position at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Ben Wolfe and I are just getting our lab up and running (virtually at the moment, but hopefully in-person soon), and we’re excited to grow our lab and work on new projects that sit at the intersection of applied and basic vision science. It has been challenging, but also a lot of fun to think of ways to transition our work to an online format. Aside from that, I’ve been enjoying the change of scenery and places to explore outdoors, and looking forward to more once the weather gets warmer.
