Northwestern Visual Cognition Lab

Within both the natural world and constructed displays, our visual system transforms a raw image into objects and relations. Our lab explores this transformation: how we group objects together, how we know whether one object is larger, brighter or farther to the right than another, how many objects we can deal with at once, and how we track them over space & time.

Beyond their theoretical importance, these questions are vital to applications in education (e.g. graph understanding) and broader information visualization.

Projects

Much of our newest work is on evaluating models of spatial relationship processing

We argue that some types of relative magnitude judgments may require a ‘routine’ of attention

Selecting or tracking multiple objects at once may be limited only by ‘cortical’ spacing among the objects, setting a limit on individuation

Some types of similarity grouping, including common fate, may only happen for a single group at a time

Our recent work explores the influence of perceptual routines on graph comprehension

We are exploring the potential role of the attentional ‘spotlight’ in influencing object structure

lab

Check out the vision+ group webpage, with information about Northwestern’s visual perception research labs

Lab news

Congrats to Lauren Kahn and Derek Tam for completing honors theses in the lab!

Opportunities in the lab

A postdoctoral position is available in this laboratory.

We may be accepting a new Ph.D. student for 2012 - please contact Steve Franconeri for more information.

We are always looking for enthusiastic undergraduates interested in learning about visual cognition research.