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Overview My research interests lie in visual perception, attention, and memory and I explore these topics along a number of fronts. One line of research is linked by a common focus on the nature of persisting object representations - how we perceive and represent visual information as the same objects over time and motion. Coherent visual experience requires first segmenting the incoming visual information into objects (i.e. forming discrete representations) and then binding successive views of the world together into representations of persisting objects. I have explored how such processing occurs using both infant cognition and adult cognition techiniques. A second line of my research explores various influences on visual search - how we find a target amongst a set of distractors. This research is based upon how baggage screeners, radiologists, and military personnel conduct real-world visual searches and has the goal of directly informing such searches. We have explored aspects of the search process itself (e.g., how often targets occur and whether one or more targets can occur in the same search array) and aspects of the searchers (i.e., are some individuals better visual searchers than others and if so how can we identify them and make them even better?). Another thread of my research program is focused on the effects of prior experiences and individual differences on the malleability of visual cognition. We explore how certain activities, traits, personalities, and predalictions can affect visual and attentional abilities. For example, we work with Nike to look at the effects of visual training and the Army and the Department of Homeland Security to look at how various groups of individuals perform differently on basic visual and attentional tasks. See more here. Questions of recent interest include: How are items detected in rare and dual-target visual searches? What makes one individual a 'better' visual searcher than another? How can specific training regimens enhance sports vision? How and why does videogame playing enhance visual abilities? How are visual changes detected and what does this tell us? What is the relationship between awareness and visual perception? How do visual representations differ for infants, young adults, and older adults? Current and Recent Collaborators
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