A large part of my ‘surviving the crisis’ as a cognitive scientist and mother of two has involved engaging and continuously entertaining two little ones at home (a speedster 2-year-old who gets into everything and a prankster 4-year-old with a clever sense of humor). One way my husband and I have found to cope is […]
I recently had the pleasure of meeting with Allie Sinclair to chat about her latest paper published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. True or False? Diamonds are formed when coal undergoes high pressure. Coffee reduces the influence of alcohol. Sunflowers turn to track the sun across the sky. All are false. If you happened to […]
This semester I have the privilege of teaching three sections of introductory psychology. While teaching this many sections generally makes things challenging (the third time being the charm does not apply since by then you can’t keep straight what you have or have not covered), doing so with online, virtual classes that seem never to […]
Have you ever been hit on the head? How long it’s been since you did? Blows to the head are not uncommon, they can happen in sports, accidental falls, fights, and in plenty of other ways. Heck, they can happen sometimes just because you crouch down looking for something and then miscalculate your distance when […]
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 […]