What?! Two new Digital Associate Editors in one week?! That’s right. I’m pleased to introduce you to our newest member of the Psychonomic Society’s Digital Content Team, Benjamin Wolfe (pictured below). To do so, I’ll start with a test question.
Ben Wolfe ___________________________.
a. is married to Anna Kosovicheva
b. is the son of Jeremy Wolfe, Editor-in-Chief of Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications
c. thinks he is co-PI of a lab that is probably really run by a cat
d. all of the above
If you answered “d. all of the above,” you’re correct! Read my interview with Ben to learn about his research on driver behavior and readability, his thoughts on what our most challenging unsolved issues are, what he means by the “iceberg problem,” why he’s joined our team, and more. You should also follow him (@benwolfevision) on Twitter for science, pictures of baked goods, and Toroto. You’ll soon be able to read Ben’s first post, written with Anna Kosovicheva, which will appear later this week.
Without further ado, here’s Ben!
What’s your area of research?
My research is broadly use-inspired vision science, looking to the world for interesting problems, bringing those questions into the lab, studying them with a vision science and psychophysical lens, and then conveying the results back to applied and basic research communities. At the moment, my research has two major focus areas: driver behavior and readability.
I study driving because it’s a great way to study perception in the world, where there are temporal limits and profound consequences for failing the perceptual tasks involved. Taking this approach gives me a naturalistic perspective on questions like how we perceive dynamic natural scenes, how we use peripheral vision, how we deal with distraction and what the balance point between eye movements and peripheral vision is for real-world environments and tasks.
I also work on questions in readability, or how we can use our understanding of visual perception to improve individuals’ ability to read text and extract information from it. I have one foot in basic research and one foot in more applied research, but my work is fundamentally oriented towards research that’s generalizable and broadly applicable; I just like to find my problems (and stimuli) in the world.
What’s the most exciting concept in cognitive science?
It’s a bit of an old idea, but probably the fact that we can understand how we perceive the world just by asking the right questions. My goal is fundamentally to understand why we do what we do, whether that’s why a driver made a specific action, or why we look one place in an image rather than another, or what makes it hard for students to absorb visual information from a given text, and the fact that we can figure out much of what’s going on here just by being clever and designing good experiments and asking the right questions is pretty exciting. In some ways, it’s the entire basis of experimental psychology, but it’s an enduring approach particularly because it’s so powerful.
What’s the most critical unsolved challenge or unanswered question for cognitive scientists?
I think the largest question in vision science exists in the chasm between what we think we perceive and the information we have for action in the world. We don’t think about each of our saccades or everything in our peripheral visual field. When we ask people what they think they perceive, there’s a substantial disconnect between what people say they perceive and what they can do, and what they can do suggests they have a lot more information than they know about. I jokingly call it the Iceberg Problem, since only about 10% of an iceberg is visible above the surface – and conscious awareness is the easy part of perception to study. What’s going on with the remaining 90%? At some level, we must be acquiring and using a lot more information than we’re aware of but figuring out how to probe the bottom of the iceberg is a rewarding challenge.
What drew you to science communication?
Since my research looks to the world for problems and situations, communicating results to the larger community, not just my fellow scientists, is a key part of doing this kind of work. It doesn’t do us, collectively, much good if we’ve got answers to questions and problems locked up in the lab when they can be out in the world making things better for everyone. Particularly in more applied research, it’s very easy for findings to get simplified and distorted, and by communicating results in ways that are memorable and clear, I try to minimize that distortion. Real-world problems are complex and multifaceted, and if I can communicate my results clearly, maybe we’ll get to more complete solutions sooner than we would otherwise.
Is there anything else you want us to know about you?
I co-direct the Applied Perception and Psychophysics Lab (APPLY Lab; Twitter lab account @applylab) at the University of Toronto Mississauga with my wife, Anna Kosovicheva. We’ve been known to collaborate with our cat, Totoro (although his approach to collaboration is usually to sit on us). I’ve got a long-standing theory that science can only be improved by baking and eating tasty baked goods (which usually get posted to Twitter), and our research on this question is ongoing.
