2024 Satellite Events

Organizers: Sabrina Hansmann-Roth, University of Iceland; Bjoern Joerges, York University; William Ngiam, University of Chicago; Janna Wennberg, University of California

It is customary for conference posters to contain at least preliminary results – that is some data has to have been collected. However, criticism and suggestions with regards to the experimental design – a major benefit of poster sessions – would be most helpful before data collection has even started. Receiving feedback at an early stage in research promotes rigorous and impactful science by helping researchers identify confounds, hidden assumptions, or even learn of issues with past attempts before it is too late, cutting down on research waste and enabling suggested changes being implemented to their experiments. This mirrors one of the key advantages of Open Science initiatives like Registered Reports, which adds peer scrutiny of a preregistration before data is collected. Following the positive response of last year’s attendees, we would therefore like to organize another pre-data-collection poster session in the context of VSS2024.

Interested VSS attendees will be asked to sign up by indicating their research topic and a short (250 word) description of their research idea and the methods to be used. To ensure that researchers are able to discuss current projects, registration for this event will be just-in-time (deadline May 5th). Those selected will be asked to prepare a conference poster which focuses heavily on the theoretical background of the study, and their proposed study methods. Attendance will be capped at a number of 40 participants and spots will be granted on a first come, first serve basis after a quick basic quality check by the organizers.

We are aware that, under an adversarial, competitive – dare I say capitalist – view of academia, this event may place presenters in a vulnerable position – participation publicizes research ideas without allowing them to formally lay claim through a publication. We encourage poster viewers to be mindful, using this event to establish collaboration with presenters and improve science. We will be creating an Open Science Framework Meetings page if presenters wish to upload their pre-data posters, providing a verification and timestamp of their research proposals. However, ultimately if you are worried about getting scooped, presenting your idea at this event might not be the right decision for you.

If you want to present a poster on your proposed research design, you can submit your abstract using this Google Form. If you merely want to browse and comment on the posters, no registration is necessary.

Negotiation: When To Do It and How To Do It Successfully

Tuesday, May 21, 2024, 1:00 – 2:30 pm, Jasmine/Palm

Sponsored by: Females of Vision et al (FoVea)

Organizers: Diane Beck, University of Illinois & Charisse B. Pickron, University of Minnesota

Two panelists will share their thoughts on when and how to negotiate. Topics will include: knowing when to negotiate, how to prepare for negotiations, ways to demonstrate your skills, priorities, and needs while negotiating, and challenges that arise during negotiations, particularly for women. The panelists will each give a brief presentation, and then will take questions and comments from the audience and lead a discussion.

Speakers:

Marisa Carrasco, Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University who served as the Chair of the Psychology Department for 6 years

Allison Sekuler, Sandra A Rotman Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience, Rotman Research Institute
President & Chief Scientist, Baycrest Academy for Research and Education, and the Centre for Aging + Brain Health Innovation, Professor, Psychology, University of Toronto, Professor Emeritus, Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, McMaster University

FoVea is a group founded to advance the visibility, impact, and success of women in vision science (www.foveavision.org). We encourage vision scientists of all genders to participate in the workshops.

Art of Memory Exhibition

Organizers: Wilma Bainbridge, University of Chicago; Trent Davis, University of Chicago

The Brain Bridge Lab will be showing the Art of Memory exhibition throughout this year’s VSS conference! As a part of our research into the relationship between art and memory, we are hosting an art contest where we challenge artists to try to create the most memorable and forgettable artworks! Unlike traditional art contests, the winners are determined solely based on the artwork’s memorability score, or how well they manipulate the memory of the viewer.

There will be several poster boards in the registration lobby filled with the most memorable and forgettable artworks from the Brain Bridge Lab’s art contest! We invite all VSS-goers to view all of the paintings in this pop-up exhibition, where you will have the opportunity to test your memory and win prizes!

We would love for any and all artists among the VSS crowd to enter our contest by April 1st (https://brainbridgelab.uchicago.edu/artcontest/), for the chance to win cash prizes and have your work displayed at both the Connect Gallery in Chicago and at VSS!

So you published your work – now what? Paths for vision scientists to drive societal impact

Monday, May 20, 2024, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, Blue Heron

Organizers: Sharon Gilad-Gutnick¹ & Ella Striem-Amit²

Speakers: Lotfi Merabet³; Jeremy Wolfe⁴; Sharon Gilad-Gutnick¹;Simon Fischer-Baum⁵; Cheri Wiggs⁶

¹Massachusetts Institute of Technology / Project Prakash
²Georgetown University Medical Center
³Massachusetts Eye & Ear / Harvard Medical School
⁴Brigham & Women’s Hospital / Harvard Medical School
⁵Rice University / National Science Foundation⁶National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health

The primary objective of this workshop is to aid in harnessing the insights from vision science to inform practical applications. As vision researchers, we possess a comprehensive understanding of the significance of vision and the crucial role played by brain mechanisms in supporting visual perception. While we advocate for evidence-based policies, rehabilitation initiatives, and school-based vision screening, there is an apparent gap in ensuring that our scientific knowledge effectively reaches the key stakeholders who can drive meaningful changes in both clinical and neurotypical populations. Several challenges, such as delayed translation between research and medical treatment, resource limitations, and a lack of incentives for researchers to engage with stakeholders, hinder our impact on society.

The workshop aims to address these challenges by creating a roadmap for vision researchers, offering tangible pathways for them to engage directly with society through their research. This engagement can take various forms, including promoting policy change, collaborating with clinicians and schools, and advocating for evidence-based interventions. The desired outcome of the event is to establish a network of scientists interested in pursuing implementation science within vision research. Eventually, this network could evolve into a permanent organization or committee dedicated to supporting such initiatives within the vision sciences community.

The workshop agenda will include presentations by researchers discussing how policy can be derived from vision science findings, featuring challenges, success stories and sharing advocacy resources. Additionally, we will hear from representatives from a funding agency about available mechanisms supporting such work, as well as from representatives from organizations driving evidence-based policy research. The workshop will also include breakout sessions into round tables, providing attendees with a platform to share their experiences, challenges, and ideas for creating a collaborative community to drive these initiatives forward. Ultimately, the workshop aims to establish a network of individuals interested in further collaboration and follow-up efforts.

How to stop worrying and love computational neuroimaging of the visual cortex

Monday, May 20, 2024, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, Banyan/Citrus

Organizers: Noah Benson, University of Washington & Mark Schira, University of Wollongong

Speakers: Noah C. Benson; Fernanda L. Ribeiro; Mark M. Schira

To register or for more information about this workshop, please visit https://nben.net/vss2024/

Contemporary vision science requires substantial computational resources and expertise, yet traditional vision science training does not typically focus on learning, maintaining, or keeping up-to-date with modern computational tools. Simultaneously, the space of open source software tools, such as fMRIprep, and open standards, such as BIDS, available for vision and neuroimaging research has exploded in recent years. This environment greatly facilitates robust and reproducible research but is simultaneously difficult to navigate for investigators of all experience levels.

This workshop will demonstrate how laboratory management, reproducible scientific practices, and contemporary neuroimaging analysis methods can all be greatly simplified using existing tools that abstract away the technical complexities of managing software and hardware resources. We will begin this workshop by introducing the Neurodesk platform (https://www.neurodesk.org/), a free, open-source system for managing laboratory data, installations of research software, and computational jobs for lab members. Neurodesk is modular, includes most common neuroscience software tools, and can run as easily on a researcher’s PC, in the cloud, or on a lab server. All participants in the workshop will be given access to a Neurodesk cloud instance that can be used to follow along with tutorials and examples in the session (no installation required by participants). We will discuss how Neurodesk can be used as a teaching, management, and high performance computing tool before demonstrating the use of several well-established open-source software tools in Neurodesk by creating a simple, reproducible workflow together that is focused in particular on connecting models of the cortical surface to voxel-based analyses, including the drawing of visual area boundaries and features on the cortical surface. Finally, we will discuss cutting-edge tools for brain annotation: convolutional neural networks.

This workshop is intended for all audiences: students and junior researchers can expect to learn about powerful tools and techniques that facilitate high-quality research, while senior investigators can expect to learn about valuable tools for lab management and teaching. All researchers stand to benefit from the adoption of community-supported open-source tools such as Neurodesk and the many independent tools supported by Neurodesk that we will demonstrate.

Psychophysics Software with MATLAB

Monday, May 20, 2024, 2:00 – 3:30 pm, Jasmine/Palm

Organizers: Vijay Iyer, MathWorks; Alexis Paez, MathWorks; Greg Ginnan, INCF

Speakers: Alexis Paez, PhD, MathWorks; Greg Ginnan, PhD, INCF; Vijay Iyer, PhD, MathWorks; Mario Kleiner (lead developer) and Celia Foster, PhD, Psychophysics Toolbox; Lindsey Fraser, PhD, VPixx; Justin Gardner, PhD, MGL; Giles Holland (lead developer), PsychBench

Many experimental studies in Vision Science fall within the realm of psychophysics: the quantitative control of sensory stimuli combined with quantitative measurement of perception. Since the personal computing era, psychophysical vision science has been critically empowered and accelerated by software tools, such as the Psychophysics Toolbox (PTB), enabling diverse visual stimuli to be presented to subjects with careful timing of both stimulus and response. This satellite event will convene developers of various psychophysics software packages released with substantial or fully open-source code in MATLAB (a widely-used scientific computing language), to present their latest updates and respond to questions and feedback from the VSS community. Event will also include brief presentations/discussions by the MathWorks (makers of MATLAB) and the INCF (an international organization dedicated to open and FAIR neuroscience).

VISxVISION Workshop: Vision Science and Data Visualization Research

Sunday, May 19, 2024, 7:15 – 9:15 pm, Banyan/Citrus

Organizers: Ouxun Jiang, Northwestern University; Ghulam Jilani Quadri, University of Oklahoma; Clementine Zimnicki, University of Wisconsin Madison; Racquel Fygenson, Northeastern University

Interdisciplinary work across vision science and data visualization has provided a new lens to advance our understanding of the capabilities and mechanisms of the visual system while simultaneously improving the ways we visualize data. Vision scientists can better understand human perception by studying how people interact with visualized data. Vision science topics, including visual search, ensemble coding, multiple object tracking, color and shape perception, pattern recognition, and saliency, map directly to challenges encountered in visualization research.

VISxVISION is an initiative to encourage communication and collaboration between researchers from the vision science and data visualization research communities. Building on the growing interest in this topic and the discussions inspired by our recent IEEE VIS Workshop in 2023 (featuring keynote speakers Drs. Bart Anderson, Steve Most, and Kim Curby, with attendance of over 30), as well as IEEE VIS Workshops in 2021 (featuring keynote speakers Drs. Keisuke Fukuda, Jiaying Zhao, and Todd Horowitz; with attendance of over 70) and 2019 (featuring keynote speakers Drs. Jeremy Wolfe, Timothy Brady, and Darko Odic; with attendance of over 80), our 2020 and 2019 VSS satellite events (attendance over 70), and our 2018 VSS symposium (attendance over 200), this workshop provides a continuing platform to bring together vision science and visualization researchers to share cutting-edge research at this interdisciplinary intersection. We also encourage researchers to share vision science projects that can be applied to topics in data visualization.

Modeled on last year’s success, this year’s workshop will consist of invited talks followed by a Q&A session and a 1-hour poster session.

A call for abstracts will solicit recent, relevant research at the intersection of vision science and visualization or collaborative/applied projects in either field (deadline: April 1). The top submissions will be selected for presentation as posters at the workshop (notification: April 15).

Please register for VisxVision.

The Vision Science of Digital Readability: Community-Building Workshop

Friday, May 17, 2024, 9:00 am – 12:00 pm, Royal Tern

Organizers: Dr. Nilsu Atilgan, The Readability Consortium; Dr. Ben D. Sawyer, University of Central Florida; Dr. Steven Clapp, University of Central Florida

Speakers: Dr. Denis Pelli, New York University; Dr. Ben Wolfe, University of Toronto Mississauga; Dr. Shaun Wallace, University of Rhode Island; Dr. Hilary Palmen, Google; Dr. Yingzi Xiong, Johns Hopkins University; Dr. David Robert Reich, University of Potsdam, and more to come.

A community of scientific inquiry is emerging around reading in the digital interface. Academic disciplines ranging from vision science to computer science are finding it central to their work to have a mechanistic and applied understanding of reading processes. The research is highly distributed, and this diversity is both valuable and challenging for each researcher to build and maintain an overview of emerging significant research knowledge and trends.

This workshop is a space to facilitate this interdisciplinary research scheme. Participants; vision scientists, industry partners and computer scientists, will discuss how to approach digital reading problems and solutions, exchange experimental knowledge and effective perspectives on application challenges. These discussions can open up new avenues for each research cohort and help understand the problem in a more holistic perspective. This workshop will also promote cross-cultural studies through emphasizing readability research beyond English and the Latin writing system.

The Readability Consortium (TRC) is driving this workshop, we were formed in 2021 to progress reading research methodology and practice. We are motivated to act as a catalyst to facilitate the existence of a broader reading research community that progresses: Understanding reading processes and applying new technologies in ways that will enable people globally to reach their full reading potential, including, but not limited to, people with dyslexia and low vision.

Schedule (3 hours)

Opening remarks (15 minutes)
Lightning talks (90 minutes)
Coffee break (15 minutes)
Small group discussions -for creation of future research directions and guidelines- (20 minutes)
Whole group discussion and closing remarks (40 minutes)

For more information please visit the Digital Readability Workshop website.

2023 Pre-Data-Collection Poster Session

Monday, May 22, 2023, 2:00 – 4:00 pm, Jasmine/Palm

Organizers: Sabrina Hansmann-Roth, University of Iceland; Bjoern Joerges, York University; William Ngiam, University of Chicago; Janna Wennberg, University of California

It is customary for conference posters to contain at least preliminary results. However, feedback and suggestions with regards to the experimental design – a major benefit of poster sessions – would be most helpful before data collection has started. In hopes of achieving this, we will be hosting a pre-data collection poster session.

Receiving feedback at this early stage promotes rigorous and impactful science – researchers can identify confounds, hidden assumptions, or other concerns that would likely be raised by reviewers. This cuts down research waste as suggested changes can be implemented before resources are committed. Researchers may even learn of similar studies and potential issues, helpful resources, or opportunities for collaborations between labs. This mirrors Registered Reports, an Open Science initiative, where peer review of a pre-registration occurs before data is collected.

Interested VSS attendees will be asked to sign up by indicating their research topic and a short (250 word) description of their research idea and preliminary design. Registration for this event will be just-in-time ~~(deadline: May 1)~~. Those selected will be asked to prepare a conference poster which focuses on the theoretical background of the study and their proposed study methods. There will be a maximum of 40 posters, and spots will be granted on a first come, first serve basis.

We are aware that, under an adversarial, competitive view of academia, this event may place presenters in a vulnerable position – participation publicizes research ideas without allowing them to formally lay claim through a publication. We encourage poster viewers to be mindful, using this event to establish collaboration with presenters and improve science. We will be creating an Open Science Framework Meetings page if presenters wish to upload their pre-data posters, providing a verification and timestamp of their research proposals. However, ultimately if you are worried about getting scooped, presenting your idea at this event might not be the right decision for you.

Update May 2nd: Submissions are still open, but please send us a note () to make sure that we process your submission promptly.

Update May 16th: Please find the abstract booklet here:

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