The visual world presents us with an enormous amount of information, continuously conveyed to our visual system by tens of millions of photoreceptors. Despite this complexity, our visual system dynamically organizes this information into a stable and coherent percept, where we are able to perform complex tasks like navigating through a building, recognizing people, objects, and places, or reading trends from a graph.

The research in our laboratory focuses on how the visual system distills and processes visual information, with two major themes. The first is visual selection. Some kinds of processing can be applied broadly to entire views, while others must be restricted to a subset of visual information, such as a set of locations or objects. What tools do we have available for selecting subsets of information, and what kinds of operations are restricted to the subset?

The second theme is visual cognition. Given the tools we have available to select information, how do we decide what to select? How do we deploy selection over time to achieve goals like comparing objects, or representing the structure and relations among them? How does selection interact with memory to allow us to accomplish these deceptively simple tasks?

News

• Check out the new vision+ group webpage, with information about Northwestern Psychology's visual perception research labs
  
  
• We may be accepting graduate students for next year - contact Steve Franconeri for more information.
  
  
• The lab welcomes Lucie Xu as a new graduate student Fall 2009.
  
  
• The lab welcomes Stacey Parrott as a new graduate student Fall 2009.
  
  
• The lab welcomes Hyun-Young Park as a research associate.
  
  
• The lab welcomes Ilana Feldman as a research associate.
  
  
• Congratulations to Sumeeth Jonathan for winning an Undergraduate Research Fellowship.
  
  
• Congratulations to Lauren Kahn for winning an Undergraduate Research Fellowship.
  
  
• The lab welcomes Brian Levinthal, from Urbana-Champaign, as a postdoc in 2009
  
  
• The lab welcomes Heeyoung Choo, from Yonsei University, as a new graduate student.
  
  
• Congratulations to Claudia Lau for winning a Cognitive Science Fellowship.
  
  
• Congratulations to Jeff Lin on entering the Ph.D. program in Psycholgy at the University of Washington.
  
  
• Congratulations to Jeff Nelson, former lab head RA, on entering the Ph.D. program in Psycholgy at Duke University.