Tuesday, May 19, 2026, 8:30 – 10:00 pm, Banyan/Citrus

Organizers: Michael Grubb, Trinity College; Alex White, Barnard College

LGBTQ students are disproportionately likely to drop out of science early. Potential causes include the lack of visible role models and the absence of a strong community. This social event is one small step towards filling that gap and will bring awareness to continuing challenges for queer scientists.

Please join us on Tuesday night in Banyan/Citrus (located in Jacaranda Hall), before Club Vision.

All are welcome. Snacks, drinks, and camaraderie will be provided.

Wednesday, May 13

Computational and Mathematical Models in Vision (MODVIS)

Wednesday, May 13, 2026, 9:00 am – 6:00 pm, Blue Heron

Thursday, May 14

Computational and Mathematical Models in Vision (MODVIS)

Thursday, May 14, 2026, 9:00 am – 6:00 pm, Blue Heron

Saturday, May 16

Pre-Data-Collection Poster Session

Saturday, May 16, 2026, 2:45 – 6:45 pm, Banyan Breezeway

Virtual Reality + Eye Tracking for Research

Saturday, May 16, 2026, 12:45 – 2:15 pm, Blue Heron

Canadian Vision Sciences Social

Saturday, May 16, 2026, 12:30 – 2:30 pm, Palm/Sabal/Sawgrass

Sunday, May 17

In-silico replications and hypothesis testing for model benchmarking

Sunday, May 17, 2026, 12:45 – 2:15 pm, Blue Heron

VISxVISION Workshop: Vision Science and Data Visualization Research

Sunday, May 17, 2026, 12:30 – 2:30 pm, Banyan/Citrus

Visual Snow Meet-Up

Sunday, May 17, 2026, 12:45 – 2:15 pm, Horizons West

CSHL Vision Courses Meet-up

Sunday, May 17, 2026, 7:30 – 9:00 pm, Snowy Egret

FoVea Workshop: What Is This Job Anyway?

Sunday, May 17, 2026, 7:30 – 9:00 pm, Banyan/Citrus

Monday, May 18

Pre-Data-Collection Poster Session

Monday, May 17, 2026, 8:30 am – 12:30 pm, Banyan Breezeway

PURSUE workshop: How to train students in electrophysiology using open educational materials

Monday, May 18, 2026, 2:00 – 6:00 pm, Horizons West

Re:Vision: A community replication and generalization initiative for fMRI research of visual stimuli

Monday, May 18, 2026, 2:00 – 5:30 pm, Blue Heron

Tuesday, May 19

Synchronizing and Coordinating Multiple Data Acquisition Devices

Tuesday, May 19, 2026, 1:15 – 2:45 pm, Horizons West

phiVis: Philosophy of Vision Science

Tuesday, May 19, 2026, 1:00 – 2:45 pm, Banyan/Citrus

Saturday, May 16, 2026, 12:30 – 2:30 pm, Palm/Sabal/Sawgrass

Organizers: Caitlin Mullin (VISTA @ York University) and Laurie Wilcox (VISTA, Centre for Vision Research @ York University)

Speakers: Caitlin Mullin (VISTA Program Director, York University), Laurie Wilcox (VISTA Scientific Director, York University), Rob Allison (Director, Centre for Vision Research, York University)

This social event is open to any VSS member who is, knows, or would like to meet a Canadian Vision Scientist! Join us for casual discussions with students and faculty from several Canadian Institutes or to just satisfy your curiosity as to why we in the North are so polite and good natured, Eh? We particularly encourage trainees and scientists who would like to learn about the various opportunities available through York’s Centre for Vision Research (CVR) and Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) program. So, grab your toques and your double-double and come connect with your favourite Canucks. This event will feature free food and refreshments.

Sunday, May 17, 2026, 7:30 – 9:00 pm, Banyan/Citrus

Organizers: Diane Beck, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and Charisse Pickron, University of Minnesota

Speakers: Ruth Rosenholtz (NVIDIA Human Performance and Experience), Michael A. Grubb Associate Professor, Trinity College, and Zahra Hussain, Lecturer in Psychology University of Plymouth, UK

Panelists will share their experiences and speak openly about what different kinds of vision science-related careers actually look like. Their comments will include aspects of the job that they did not expect. After the panelists’ share their perspectives, we invite those in attendance to connect and share their own experiences with one another.

https://foveavision.org/vss-workshops

Sunday, May 17, 2026, 7:30 – 9:00 pm, Snowy Egret

Organizers: Kristina Nielsen, Mind/Brain Institute, Johns Hopkins University and Anthony Movshon, Center for Neural Science, NYU

This social is a reunion of the alumni of the two vision summer courses at CSHL, ‘Computational Neuroscience: Vision’, and ‘Vision: A platform for linking circuits, behavior & perception’. Please join us to reconnect with other former participants of the course!

Tuesday, May 19, 2026, 1:00 – 2:45 pm, Banyan/Citrus

Organizers: Kevin Lande, York University; Chaz Firestone, Johns Hopkins University

Speakers: Matthias Michel, MIT; Frederique de Vignemont, Institut Jean Nicod; Will Davies, Oxford University; Wilma Bainbridge, University of Chicago; Bill Warren, Brown University

The past decade has seen a resurgence in conversation between vision science and philosophy of perception on questions of fundamental interest to both fields, such as: What do we see? What is seeing for? What makes seeing different from remembering, deciding, or imagining? The phiVis workshop is a forum for continuing and expanding this interdisciplinary conversation. Short talks by philosophers of perception that engage with the latest research in vision science will be followed by discussion with a slate of vision scientists.

Conversations between philosophers of vision and vision scientists have enriched research programs in both fields. On the one hand, the latest generation of philosophers of vision are deeply immersed in the scientific literatures on natural scene statistics, visual short-term memory, ensemble perception, contour integration, amodal completion, visual salience, multi-sensory integration, visual adaptation, and much else. On the other hand, vision scientists have found a great deal of value in responding to and thinking together with philosophers about the mechanisms and effects of perceptual constancies, attentional selection, object perception, and perceptual uncertainty, to name just a handful of topics. These conversations are not only intrinsically interesting for everyone involved, they have been fruitful sources of research and collaboration. However, opportunities for dialogue are all too rare, often occurring only through chance interactions or one-off workshops. The phiVis satellite is meant to be a platform to extend these discussions.

Look for our phiVis tables at the Opening Night Reception for special refreshments.

https://www.phivis.org

Saturday, May 16, 2026, 2:45 – 6:45 pm, Banyan Breezeway
Monday, May 17, 2026, 8:30 am – 12:30 pm, Banyan Breezeway

Organizers: Sabrina Hansmann-Roth, University of Iceland; Yong Hoon Yong, Dartmouth College; Björn Jörges, York University; William Ngiam, University of Adelaide

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. The deadline will be May 1st. 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 28 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.

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.

Sunday, May 17, 2026, 12:30 – 2:30 pm, Banyan/Citrus

Organizers: Ouxun Jiang, Northwestern University; Ghulam Jilani Quadri, University of Oklahoma; Clementine Zimnicki, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Kylie Lin, Georgia Institute of Technology; Songwen Hu, Georgia Institute of Technology

Interdisciplinary work across vision science and data visualization has provided a new lens to advance our understanding of the visual system’s capabilities and mechanisms while simultaneously improving how 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 (www.visxvision.com) 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 VSS satellite in 2024 (featuring keynote speakers Drs. Jessica Witt and Keisuke Fukuda, with attendance over 50) 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 the last satellite event’s success, this year’s workshop will feature a series of invited keynote talks, a lightning talk session, and Q&A with the presenters. The workshop will conclude with a “meet & mingle” session intended to encourage more informal discussion among participants and to inspire interdisciplinary collaboration.

A call for abstracts on https://visxvision.com 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 lightning talk presentations at the workshop (notification: April 15).

Call for abstracts: https://forms.gle/wYMnGr8XrkSULAng7

Please register at: https://forms.gle/uF4Zyv7vAaAhGEnY7

Sunday, May 17, 2026, 12:45 – 2:15 pm, Blue Heron

Organizer: Ruolin Wang, Georgia Institute of Technology

Speakers: Ruolin Wang, Mayukh Deb, Apurva Ratan Murty

This satellite event will show how in-silico experimentation can be used as practical framework for benchmarking computational models of the human brain. The core idea is simple: many experiments in vision science can now be instantiated entirely in-silico. While the possibility of running in-silico studies is widely discussed, the systematic re-simulation of past experiment studies (using the original stimuli and analyses etc) has been lacking. This satellite event builds directly on our recent efforts (Wang, Deb et al. in prep) that show how prior experiments can be replayed in silico and used to evaluate which findings replicate across candidate brain models and which do not.

The session will be divided into three parts. In the first session (~1h), we will introduce the in-silico replication framework (30 min) and walk through a complete experimental simulation pipeline (30 min). We will show concretely how one should go about simulating studies in models, how prior studies can be replicated computationally, and discuss best practices for quantifying replication success across models. The second session (~30 min) will be hands-on. Participants will be invited to run their own experiments in silico using a drag-and-drop executable modeling framework which we will introduce. Attendees are encouraged to test prior results, current experimental designs, or even untested ideas on several computational models. This session is designed as a period of open exploration In the final session (~30 min), participants will discuss their findings in an open forum. We will identify and celebrate successful replications. But even more importantly, we hope to expose gaps and loopholes that current models exploit. By drawing on clever experimental manipulations from the cognitive vision neuroscience community, this session aims to stress-test (and even break) models in ways that are theoretically informative. Take together, the session aims to turn in-silico replications on computational models into a scalable community-driven adversarial tool for accelerating theory building and model development in vision science.

We additionally would like to point out another VSS Satellite event called “Re:Vision: A community replication and generalization initiative for fMRI research of visual stimuli” that will complement the model benchmarking session.

Saturday, May 16, 2026, 12:45 – 2:15 pm, Blue Heron

Organizers: Matthias Pusch, WorldViz VR and Sado Rabaudi, WorldViz VR
Speakers: Sado Rabaudi, Product Manager, Solutions Architect, WorldViz VR;
Dan Tinkham, Head Of Sales, Americas, WorldViz VR
Andrew Beall, Co-Founder, WorldViz VR
Kenneth Karthik, Technical Development, WorldViz VR

WorldViz VR will lead an educational seminar and hands-on demonstration showing how modern virtual- and mixed-reality headsets with built-in eye tracking can be used for vision research. We’ll cover core concepts such as calibration and validation, stimulus presentation, response capture, and synchronized data logging, along with how to leverage AI in VR research studies.

The session will include a demonstration of SightLab VR Pro’s drag-and-drop tools for building VR and eye-tracking studies, showing how researchers can quickly create immersive experiments without extensive programming. We’ll also preview a new experiment blueprint format—a structured, machine-checkable study definition designed to make experiments easier to reuse, verify, and reproduce across labs and hardware, while supporting transparent LLM-assisted experiment workflows. We’ll close by running the same blueprint on both a desktop-tethered and a standalone VR/AR headset.

Participants will walk away with a better understanding of currently available immersive technology and how they can use it in their own research – they may be surprised how easy it is.