2021 Satellite Events

An introduction to TELLab – The Experiential Learning LABoratory, a web-based platform for educators

An introduction to TELLab 2.0 – A new-and-improved version of The Experiential Learning LABoratory, a webbased platform for educators

Canadian Vision Science Social

Measuring and Maximizing Eye Tracking Data Quality with EyeLinks

Mentoring Envisioned

New Tools for Conducting Eye Tracking Research

Performing Eye Tracking Studies in VR

phiVIS: Philosophy of Vision Science Workshop

Reunion: Visual Neuroscience From Spikes to Awareness

Run MATLAB/Psychtoolbox Experiments Online with
Pack & Go

Teaching Vision

Virtual VPixx Hardware with the LabMaestro Simulator

Visibility: A Gathering of LGBTQ+ Vision Scientists and
Friends

2020 Satellite Events

No Satellite Events were presented at the V-VSS 2020 meeting.

Saturday, May 22, 2021, 8:00 – 9:00 AM EDT

Organizers: Jeff Mulligan, Independent contractor to UC Berkeley; Jeremy Wilmer, Wellesley College
Speakers: Ken Nakayama, Jeremy Wilmer, Justin Junge, Jeff Mulligan, Sarah Kerns

This satellite event will provide a tutorial overview of The Experiential Learning Lab (TELLab), a web-based system that allows students to create and run their own psychology experiments, either by copying and modifying one of the many existing experiments, or creating a new one entirely from scratch.  The TELLab project was begun a number of years ago by Ken Nakayama and others at Harvard University, and continues today under Ken’s leadership from his new position as adjunct professor at UC Berkeley.  To date, TELLab has been used by around 20 instructors and 5000 students.

After a short introduction, TELLab gurus will demonstrate the process of creating and running an experiment, exporting the data and analyzing the results.  Complete details can be found on TELLab’s satellite information website:  http://vss.tellab.org.  Potential attendees are encouraged to visit the site at http://lab.tellab.org beforehand to create their own account and explore the system on their own.

Hope to see you there.  Happy experimenting!

Wednesday, May 15

Computational and Mathematical Models in Vision (MODVIS)

Wednesday, May 15 – Friday, May 17, Horizons
9:00 am – 6:00 pm, Wednesday
9:00 am – 6:00 pm, Thursday
8:30 – 11:45 am, Friday

Organizers: Jeff Mulligan, NASA Ames Research Center; Zygmunt Pizlo, UC Irvine; Anne B. Sereno, Purdue University; and Qasim Zaidi, SUNY College of Optometry

Keynote Selection Committee: Yalda Mohsenzadeh, MIT; Michael Rudd, University of Washington

The 8th VSS satellite workshop on Computational and Mathematical Models in Vision (MODVIS) will be held at the Tradewinds Island Resorts in St. Pete Beach, FL, May 15 – May 17.

A keynote address will be given by Dr. Yanxi Liu, Penn State University.

The early registration fee is $100 for regular participants, $50 for students. After March 31st, the registration fee will increase to $120 (regular) and $60 (student).

Friday, May 17

Improving the precision of timing-critical research with visual displays

Friday, May 17, 9:00 – 11:00 am, Jasmine/Palm

Organizers: Sophie Kenny, VPixx Technologies; Peter April, VPixx Technologies

VPixx Technologies is a privately held company serving the vision research community by developing innovative hardware and software tools for vision scientists (www.vpixx.com).

Visual display and computer technologies have improved on many fronts over the years; however, impressive technical specifications of devices mask the fact that timing of concurrent events is not typically controlled with a high degree of precision. This is a problem for scientists whose research relies on synchronization of external recording equipment relative to the onset of a visual stimulus. During this workshop, we will demonstrate the use of hardware solutions to improve upon these issues. We will first describe the principle behind these hardware solutions. We will then showcase how experiments can be programmed to control the triggering of external devices, to play audio signals, and to record digital, analog and audio signals, all synchronized with microsecond accuracy to screen refresh.

To help us plan this event, please send an email signalling your interest to:

Psychophysics Toolbox Forum

Friday, May 17, 11:00 – 11:45 am, Jasmine/Palm

Organizer: Vijay Iyer, MathWorks

Forum for researchers, vendors, and others who work with the Psychophysics Toolbox (PTB) widely used for visual stimulus generation in vision science. MathWorks is pleased to support the PTB’s ongoing development, which is now hosted at the Medical Innovations Incubator (MII) in Tuebingen. A consortium led by industry is emerging to support the PTB project. Join to learn more about the new arrangement and to provide your input on future directions for PTB.

Saturday, May 18

Large-scale datasets in visual neuroscience

Saturday, May 18, 8:30 – 10:30 pm, Jasmine/Palm

Organizers: Elissa Aminoff, Fordham University; John Pyles, Carnegie Mellon University

Speakers: Elissa Aminoff, Fordham University; Kendrick Kay, University of Minnesota; John Pyles, Carnegie Mellon University; Michael Tarr, Carnegie Mellon University

The future of vision science lends itself more and more to using large real-world image datasets (n > 1,000) to study and understand the neural and functional mechanisms underlying vision. As the size of such datasets (and the resulting data) increases, there are commensurate challenges to effectively and successfully collect, distribute, and analyze large-scale data. If you are interested in discussing these challenges, please join us.

The format of this event will be brief presentations by researchers who have recently collected or analyzed large fMRI datasets, followed by an open discussion.

Sunday, May 19

FoVea (Females of Vision et al) Workshop

Sunday, May 19, 7:30 – 9:00 pm, Horizons

Organizers: Diane Beck, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Mary A. Peterson, University of Arizona; Karen Schloss, University of Wisconsin – Madison; Allison Sekuler, Baycrest Health Sciences

Panel Discussion on Navigating a Life in Science as a Woman
Panel Discussants: Lynne Kiorpes (New York University), Ruth Rosenholtz (MIT), Preeti Verghese (Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute), Emily Ward (University of Wisconsin – Madison)

The panel will begin by addressing issues they consider important/informative and then address questions.

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.

Please register at: http://www.foveavision.org/vss-workshops 

Monday, May 20

Aesthetics Social

Monday, May 20, 2:00 – 3:30 pm, Sabal/Sawgrass

Organizers: Edward Vessel, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics; Karen Schloss, University Wisconsin-Madison; Aenne Brielmann (New York University); Ilkay Isik (MPIEA); Dominik Welke (MPIEA)

Our lives are full of aesthetic experiences. When we look at art, people surrounding us, or views out of the window, we cannot help but assess how much the sight pleases us. This social meeting brings together researchers interested in understanding such aesthetic responses. We will highlight aesthetics research being presented at VSS in a “Data Blitz” session, followed by an open discussion and time to socialize. Light refreshments will be offered.

Data Blitz presentations are open to anyone presenting aesthetics-related work at VSS. Selection for presentation will be made by the organizing committee based on scientific rigor, potential impact and interest, academic position (preference given to students/early stage researchers), and whether your work was selected for a talk or poster at VSS (priority given to posters).

If you are interested in presenting your findings at the Data Blitz session please send an email to  (ATTN: Aesthetics Social Data Blitz) by April 5, 2019 with the following information:

• Presenter name, affiliation, and academic status (student/postdoc/PI/etc.)
• Presenter contact information (email, phone)
• Presentation title and abstract
• Date/time and type of VSS presentation (poster/talk)

This event is sponsored by the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA; https://www.science-of-aesthetics.org) and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA; https://www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en.html).

A hands-on crash course in reproducible mixed-effects modeling

Monday, May 20, 2:00 – 4:00 pm, Glades

Organizer: Dejan Draschkow, Department of Psychology, Goethe University Frankfurt; Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford

Mixed-effects models are a powerful alternative to traditional F1/F2-mixed model/repeated-measure ANOVAs and multiple regressions. Mixed models allow simultaneous estimation of between-subject and between-stimulus variance, deal well with missing data, allow for easy inclusion of covariates and modelling of higher order polynomials. This workshop provides a focused, hands-on and state of the art treatment of applying this analysis technique in an open and reproducible way. We will provide a fully documented R pipeline, solutions for power analysis and will discuss common pitfalls and unresolved issues. It is suitable for 1) “concept attendance” – you want to be able to evaluate potential issues when reviewing a paper; 2) “implementation attendance” – strong theoretical background, low practical experience; 3) “switch attendance” – you are coming from another language or software and want to switch to R; 4) “transition attendance” – you are quite experienced in traditional analysis procedures and want to see what this is all about and 5) “refreshing attendance” – you just want to check if there are any new developments. It might not be suitable for participants with zero experience in statistics and programming and too boring for participants who perform simulation-based power analysis for mixed models or use a PCA to diagnose overfitting problems. This event is funded by a WikiMedia Open Science grant dedicated to https://smobsc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.

No registration required. First come, first served, until full. For questions or more information, please visit my website at https://www.draschkow.com/.

WorldViz VR/AR Workshop: Virtual Reality Displays Break New Ground for Research Purposes

Monday, May 20, 2:00 – 4:00 pm, Jasmine/Palm

Organizers: Matthias Pusch, WorldViz; Lucero Rabaudi, WorldViz

Beyond the wave of consumer virtual reality displays is a new lineup of professional products that are capable of generating a new class of visual stimulus that can be used by scientists. We will show two examples of what we consider most exciting for the VSS community. The first is a multi-resolution HMD that is capable of nearly 60 cycles-per-degree over a large center field of the display which then feathers to more typical HMD resolution toward the periphery. The second is a low-latency high-resolution video-see-thru technology that converts a consumer class HMD into a sophisticated augmented reality system that can be used to combine real near field objects (e.g., one’s hands or tools) with computer graphics imagery.

In this Satellite session, we will present these technologies in action with examples of how researchers can use them in practice. There will be a technical portion of the session detailing the technologies benefits and limitations, as well as a hands-on portion for attendees to try the technologies live.

VISxVISION Workshop: Novel Vision Science Research Directions in Visualization

Monday, May 20, 2:00 – 4:00 pm, Royal Tern

Organizers: Cindy Xiong, Northwestern University; Zoya Bylinskii, Adobe Research; Madison Elliott, University of British Columbia; Christie Nothelfer, Nielsen; Danielle Szafir, University of Colorado Boulder

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 gain important insights about 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 the data visualization research communities. Building on the growing interest on this topic and the discussions inspired by our symposium last year “Vision and Visualization: Inspiring novel research directions in vision science,” this workshop aims to provide a 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 have the potential to be applied to topics in data visualization.

This year’s workshop will consist of a series of lightning talks, followed by a Q&A session with the presenters. Attendees will then learn about conference and publication opportunities in this field: Brian Fisher will review the IEEE Vis conference and benefits of collaborating within data visualization, and Editors from the Journal of Vision’s upcoming special visualization edition will discuss publishing in this area. The workshop will conclude with a “meet & mingle” session with refreshments, intended to encourage more informal discussion among participants and to inspire interdisciplinary collaboration.

This event is being sponsored by Adobe Inc., the Visual Thinking Lab at Northwestern, and Colorado Boulder’s VisuaLab.

A call for abstracts on https://visxvision.com will solicit recent, relevant research at the intersection of vision science and visualization, or vision science project proposals that have the potential to be applied to topics in data visualization (deadline: April 8).  The top submissions will be selected for presentation as lightning talks at the workshop (notification: April 15). Submit your abstract here: http://bit.ly/2019abstract

Please register for the event at: http://bit.ly/2019visxvision.

Tuesday, May 21

Canadian Vision Social

Tuesday, May 21, 12:30 – 2:30 pm, Jasmine/Palm

Organizer: Doug Crawford, York Centre for Vision Research

This lunch Social is open to any VSS member who is, knows, or would like to meet a Canadian Vision Scientist! This event will feature free food and refreshments, with a complementary beverage for the first 100 attendees. We particularly encourage trainees and scientists who would like to learn about the various opportunities available through York’s Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) program. This event is sponsored by the York Centre for Vision Research and VISTA, which is funded in part by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF)

Visibility: A Gathering of LGBTQ+ Vision Scientists and friends

Tuesday, May 21, 8:30 – 10:00 pm (precedes Club Vision), Jasmine/Palm

Organizers: Alex White, University of Washington; Michael Grubb, Trinity 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. All are welcome. Snacks, drinks, and camaraderie will be provided. Sponsored by Trinity College.

Wednesday, May 22

MacGyver-ing in vision science: interfacing systems that are not supposed to work together

Wednesday, May 22, 1:00 – 3:00 pm, Chart
Organizer: Zoltan Derzsi, New York University Abu Dhabi

In research, it is sometimes necessary to push equipment beyond its design limits or to use it for something it was not designed to do. Desperation leads to creativity, and temporary workarounds end up being permanent. Usually this is the point when a design bottleneck is introduced into the experiment, which will bite back a couple of months later when nobody anticipates it, effectively ruining all the data collected (my own experience!).

This workshop will show some good practices on how to interface various systems, and how to use ordinary electronics in a vision science experiment.

You will get a free IoT (Internet of Things) kit containing a development board, some sensors, a display and light sources.

Please let me know if you plan to attend, by emailing zd8[at]nyu[dot]edu no later than the 10th of April!

The kit will contain a nodeMCU device, please make sure you pick it up on the first days of the conference. I will not be able to start from scratch on how to do programming and how to upload a firmware to the board, this will be included in the documentation and there is plenty of support online. I’d like to spend time showing how to make these bits into the cheapest calibrated D65 light source, how to automate data collection over the local network, how to build your own instruments, or simultaneously control various systems, while delivering stimuli with microsecond precision.

You will be able to adapt the workshop material for your own environment, and develop it further.

Wednesday, May 16

Computational and Mathematical Models in Vision (MODVIS)

Wednesday, May 16 – Friday, May 18, Horizons
9:00 am – 6:00 pm, Wednesday
9:00 am – 6:00 pm, Thursday
8:30 – 11:45 am Friday

Organizers: Jeff Mulligan, NASA Ames Research Center; Zygmunt Pizlo, UC Irvine; Anne B. Sereno, Purdue University; and Qasim Zaidi, SUNY College of Optometry

Keynote Selection Committee: Yalda Mohsenzadeh, MIT; Michael Rudd, University of Washington

The 7th VSS satellite workshop on Computational and Mathematical Models in Vision (MODVIS) will be held at the Tradewinds Island Resorts in St. Pete Beach, FL, May 16 – May 18. A keynote address will be given by Eero Simoncelli, New York University.

The early registration fee is $100 for regular participants, $50 for students. More information can be found on the workshop’s website: http://www.conf.purdue.edu/modvis/

Thursday, May 17

Eye Tracking in Virtual Reality

Thursday, May 17, 10:00 am – 3:00 pm, Jasmine/Palm

Organizer: Gabriel Diaz, Rochester Institute of Technology

This will be a hands-on workshop run by Gabriel Diaz, with support from his graduate students Kamran Binaee and Rakshit Kothari.

The ability to incorporate eye tracking into computationally generated contexts presents new opportunities for research into gaze behavior. The aim of this workshop is to provide an understanding of the hardware, data collection process, and algorithms for data analysis. Example data and code will be provided in two both Jupyter notebooks and Matlab (choose your preference). This workshop is sponsored by The Optical Society’s Vision Technical Group and is suitable for both PIs and graduate students.

Friday, May 18

Tutorial on Big Data and Online Crowd-Sourcing for Vision Research

Friday, May 18, 8:30 – 11:45 am, Jasmine/Palm

Organizer: Wilma Bainbridge, National Institutes of Health

Speakers: Wilma Bainbridge, National Institutes of Health; Tim Brady, University of California San Diego; Dwight Kravitz, George Washington University; and Gijsbert Stoet, Leeds Beckett University

Online experiments and Big Data are becoming big topics in the field of vision science, but can be hard to access for people not familiar with web development and coding. This tutorial will teach attendees the basics of creating online crowd-sourced experiments, and how to think about collecting and analyzing Big Data related to vision research. Four experts in the field will discuss how they use and collect Big Data, and give hands-on practice to tutorial attendees. We will discuss Amazon Mechanical Turk, its strengths and weaknesses, and how to leverage it in creative ways to collect powerful, large-scale data. We will then discuss Psytoolkit, an online experimental platform for coding timed behavioral and psychophysical tasks, that can integrate with Amazon Mechanical Turk. We will then discuss how to create Big Datasets using various ways of “scraping” large-scale data from the internet. Finally, we will discuss other sources of useful crowd-sourced data, such as performance on mobile games, and methods for scaling down and analyzing these large data sets.

To help us plan for this event, please register here: http://wilmabainbridge.com/research/bigdata/bigdataregistration.html

Sunday, May 20

FoVea (Females of Vision et al) Workshop

Sunday, May 20, 7:30 – 8:30 pm, Horizons

Organizers: Diane Beck, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Mary A. Peterson, University of Arizona; Karen Schloss, University of Wisconsin – Madison; Allison Sekuler, Baycrest Health Sciences

Speaker: Virginia Valian, Hunter College
Title: Remedying the (Still) Too Slow Advancement of Women

Dr. Valian is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Director of The Gender Equity Project.

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.

Please register at: http://www.foveavision.org/vss-workshops

Monday, May 21

Psychophysics Toolbox Discussion

Monday, May 21, 2:00 – 3:00 pm, Talk Room 1

Organizer: Vijay Iyer, MathWorks

Panelists: Vijay Iyer, David Brainard, and Denis Pelli

Discussion of the current-state (technical, funding, community status) of the Psychophysics toolbox, widely used for visual stimulus generation in vision science experiments.

Social Hour for Faculty at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs)

Monday, May 21, 2:00 – 4:00 pm, Royal Tern

Organizer: Katherine Moore, Arcadia University

Do you work at a primarily undergraduate institution (PUI)? Do you juggle your research program, student mentoring, and a heavy teaching load? If so, come along to the PUI social and get to know other faculty at PUIs! It will be a great opportunity to share your ideas and concerns. Feel free to bring your own drinks / snacks. Prospective faculty of PUIs are also welcome to attend and get to know us and our institutions.

Canadian Vision Social

Monday, May 21, 2:00 – 4:00 pm, Jasmine/Palm

Organizer: Doug Crawford, York Centre for Vision Research

This afternoon Social is open to any VSS member who is, knows, or would like to meet a Canadian Vision Scientist! This event will feature free snacks and refreshments, with a complementary beverage for the first 200 attendees. We particularly encourage trainees and scientists who would like to learn about the various research and training funds available through York’s Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) program. This event is sponsored by the York Centre for Vision Research and VISTA, which is funded in part by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF).

Tuesday, May 22

Virtual Reality as a Tool for Vision Scientists

Tuesday, May 22, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, Talk Room 1
Organizer: Matthias Pusch, WorldViz

In a hands on group session, we will show how Virtual Reality can be used by Vision Scientists for remote and on site collaborative experiments. Full experimental control over stimuli and reactions enable a unique setting for measuring performance. We will experience collaboration with off-site participants, and show the basics of performance data recording and analysis.

Computational and Mathematical Models in Vision (MODVIS) Wednesday, May 11 – Friday, May 13 9:00 am – 6:00 pm, Wednesday, Dolphin Beach Resort, 4900 Gulf Blvd., Cypress Room 9:00 am – 6:00 pm, Thursday, Horizons, Tradewinds Island Grand 9:00 am – 12:00 pm Friday, Horizons, Tradewinds Island Grand Organizers: Jeff Mulligan, NASA Ames Research Center; Zyg Pizlo, Purdue University; Anne Sereno, U. Texas Health Science Center at Houston; Qasim Zaidi, SUNY College of Optometry The 5th VSS satellite workshop on Computational and Mathematical Models in Vision (MODVIS) will feature extended oral presentations on quantitative modeling of a variety of visual processes. A keynote address will be given by Prof. Steve Zucker (Yale) on Thursday afternoon. The registration fee is $100 for regular participants, $50 for students. WorldViz Virtual Reality Workshop Saturday, May 14, 12:45 – 2:00 pm, Talk Room 2 Organizer: Matthias Pusch, WorldViz Virtual Reality gets a lot of press lately, and releases about new hardware and software are coming out pretty much daily. This session will give an overview of recent trends and new technologies and discuss their use cases and limitations for research applications. “Individual Differences in Vision” Brown Bag Lunch Sunday, May 15, 12:45 – 2:00 pm, Talk Room 2 Organizers: Hrag Pailian1 and Jeremy Wilmer2; 1Harvard University, 2Wellesley College Third biennial IDV Brown Bag: A whirlwind tour of the breadth of individual differences related work currently being conducted by VSS members. The event features a series of “micro-talks” where speakers give 2-minute presentations on cutting edge research that ranges across a wide variety of content areas. Bring your lunch, meet fellow researchers, and experience the power of the individual differences approach to vision! Are there donuts in vision? Neural computation of global image configuration by a circular receptive field. Monday, May 16, 2:00 – 4:00 pm, Sawgrass Organizers: Naoki Kogo1, Bart Machilsen1, Michele Cox2, Vicky Froyen1; 1 Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, 2Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, USA Discussants: Rüdiger von der Heydt, Johns Hopkins University Anitha Pasupathy, University of Washington James Elder, York University Michele Cox, Vanderbilt University Naoki Kogo, University of Leuven Bart Machilsen, University of Leuven Vicky Foryen, University of Leuven The global visual context influences the processing of local image information in the visual system. Ample evidence for this claim comes from neurophysiological and psychophysical studies. This special interest/discussion meeting will explore plausible neural mechanisms that reflect the global configuration of an image, and the role of such a mechanism in Gestalt-like phenomena of figure-ground organization and shape representation. These phenomena demonstrate that long-range neuronal interactions modulate the coding of local image features in early visual areas. Border-ownership selective neurons, for instance, modulate their firing rate in response to the figural side of a boundary, which can only be derived from the global image context (1). To explain this mechanism, the existence of a “grouping cell” in a recurrent neural circuit has been suggested (2). From their functional role in the computation of border ownership some structural properties of these putative grouping cells have been proposed, such as a donut-shaped receptive field. The concept of a grouping cell has relevance for various lines of research: computational neuroscience, neurophysiology, and experimental psychology. This satellite event wants to facilitate cross-talk between these disciplines by approaching this putative grouping cell from different angles. For instance, the collective activities of grouping cells can result in a “medial axis” representation, similar to the skeleton-type of shape coding developed in computer vision science (3). Also, the pattern of oriented edges in natural images has revealed a co-circular organization of luminance boundaries (4), likely due to the presence of object boundaries (5). Neurophysiological data further hint at the existence of computational mechanisms to encode global configurations: Skeleton-like neural signals have been measured in V4 (6), an area where donut-shaped receptive fields have been found (7). Grouping-cell activity has also been reported for neurons aligned to the center of an illusory surface (8). This finding is in line with a recent computational model linking the coding of border-ownership to illusory surface perception (9). In this context, the neural representation of occluded shapes can help understand the neural coding of shape and depth order (10). Taken together, the integration of approximately iso-distant edge information appears sensible given the co-circular pattern of edges in natural images and given the neurophysiological measurements and models described above. It remains to be seen whether this integrative mechanism could indeed be embedded in grouping cells with a donut-shaped receptive field. In this satellite event, the discussants from multidisciplinary backgrounds will examine the biological plausibility of this idea and discuss possible alternatives for the neural computation of global configurations in images. References Zhou H, Friedman HS, von der Heydt R. J Neurosci. 2000;20(17):6594–611. Craft E, Schutze H, Niebur E, von der Heydt R. Journal of Neurophysiology. 2007;97(6):4310–26. Feldman J, Singh M. PNAS. 2006;103(47):18014–9. Sigman M, Cecchi GA, Gilbert CD, Magnasco MO. PNAS. 2001;98(4):1935–40. Machilsen B, Demeyer M, Kogo N. J Vis. 2015;15(12):331. Hung C-C, Carlson ET, Connor CE. Neuron. 2012;74(6):1099–113. Cox MA, Schmid MC, Peters AJ, Saunders RC, Leopold DA, Maier A. PNAS. 2013;110(42):17095–100. Kogo N, Strecha C, Van Gool L, Wagemans J. Psychological Review. 2010;117(2):406–39. Bushnell BN, Harding PJ, Kosai Y, Pasupathy A. J Neurosci. 2011;31(11):4012–24. Females of Vision et al. (FoVea) Meeting Monday May 16, 5:00 – 6:00 pm, Breck Deck North Organizers: Diane Beck, University of Illinois; Mary Peterson, University of Arizona; Karen Schloss, Brown University; Allison Sekuler, McMaster University. VSS women and men of all ages and stages are invited to join us for the founding gathering of Females of Vision et al. (FoVea). We’ll discuss how, collectively, we can address issues to enhance participation in and success of women in vision science. Beverages will be provided on a first-come first-served basis until our $ runs out.

Wednesday, May 17

Computational and Mathematical Models in Vision (MODVIS)

Wednesday, May 17 – Friday, May 19, Horizons
9:00 am – 6:00 pm, Wednesday
9:00 am – 6:00 pm, Thursday
9:00 am – 12:00 pm Friday

Organizers: Jeff Mulligan, NASA Ames Research Center; Zyg Pizlo, Purdue University; Anne Sereno, U. Texas Health Science Center at Houston; Qasim Zaidi, SUNY College of Optometry

The 6th VSS satellite workshop on Computational and Mathematical Models in Vision (MODVIS) will be held at the VSS conference venue (the Tradewinds Island Resorts in St. Pete Beach, FL) May 17 – May 19. A keynote address will be given by Aude Oliva (MIT).

The early registration fee is $80 for regular participants, $40 for students. More information can be found on the workshop’s website: http://www.conf.purdue.edu/modvis/

Thursday, May 18

Implicit Guidance of Attention: Developing theoretical models

Thursday, May 18, 9:00 am – 6:00 pm, Jasmine/Palm

Organizers: Rebecca Todd, University of British Columbia and Chelazzi Leonardo, University of Verona

Speakers: Leo Chelazzi, Jane Raymond, Rebecca Todd, Andreas Keil, Clayton Hickey, Sarah Shomstein, Ayelet Landau, Brian Anderson, Jan Theeuwes

Visual selective attention is the process by which we tune ourselves to the world so that, of the millions of bits per second transmitted by the retina, the information that is most important to us reaches awareness and guides action. Recently, new areas of attention research have emerged, making sharp divisions between top-down volitional attention and bottom-up automatic capture by visual features much less clear than previously believed. Challenges to this intuitively appealing dichotomy have arisen as researchers have identified factors that guide attention non-strategically and often implicitly (a quality of bottom-up processes) but also rely on prior knowledge or experience (a quality of top-down systems). As a result, a number of researchers have been developing new theoretical frameworks that move beyond the classic attentional dichotomy. This roundtable discussion will bring together researchers from often-siloized investigative tracks who have been investigating effects of reward, emotion, semantic associations, and statistical learning on attentional guidance, as well as underlying neurocognitive mechanisms. The goal of this roundtable is to discuss these emerging frameworks and outstanding questions that arise from considering a broader range of research findings.

Friday, May 19

In the Fondest Memory of Bosco Tjan (Memorial Symposium)

Friday, May 19, 9:00 – 11:30 am, Talk Room 1-2

Organizers: Zhong-lin Lu, The Ohio State University and Susana Chung, University of California, Berkeley

Speakers: Zhong-lin Lu, Gordon Legge, Irving Biederman, Anirvan Nandy, Rachel Millin, Zili Liu, and Susana Chung

Professor Bosco S. Tjan was murdered at the pinnacle of a flourishing academic career on December 2, 2016. The vision science and cognitive neuroscience community lost a brilliant scientist and incisive commentator. I will briefly introduce Bosco’s life and career, and his contributions to vision science and cognitive neuroscience.

View Symposium Talks

Bruce Bridgeman Memorial Symposium

Friday, May 19, 9:00 – 11:30 am, Pavilion

Organizer: Susana Martinez-Conde, State University of New York

Speakers: Stephen L. Macknik, Stanley A. Klein, Susana Martinez-Conde, Paul Dassonville, Cathy Reed, and Laura Thomas

Professor Emeritus of Psychology Bruce Bridgeman was tragically killed on July 10, 2016, after being struck by a bus in Taipei, Taiwan. Those who knew Bruce will remember him for his sharp intellect, genuine sense of humor, intellectual curiosity, thoughtful mentorship, gentle personality, musical talent, and committed peace, social justice, and environmental activism. This symposium will highlight some of Bruce’s many important contributions to perception and cognition, which included spatial vision, perception/action interactions, and the functions and neural basis of consciousness.

View Symposium Talks

Saturday, May 20

How Immersive Eye Tracking Tools and VR Analytics Will Impact Vision Science Research

Saturday, May 20, 12:30 – 2:00 pm, Jasmine/Palm

Organizers: Courtney Gray, SensoMotoric Instruments, Inc. and Annett Schilling, SensoMotoric Instruments GmbH

Speakers: Stephen Macknik, SUNY Downstate Medical Center; Gabriel Diaz, Rochester Institute of Tech; Mary Hayhoe, University of Texas

This event covers the implications of new immersive HMD technologies and dedicated VR analysis solutions for vision science research. Researchers share their experiences and discuss how they believe VR eye tracking headsets and the ability to analyze data from immersive scenarios will positively impact visual cognition and scene perception research.

FoVea (Females of Vision et al) Workshop and Lunch

Saturday, May 20, 12:30 – 2:30 pm, Horizons

Organizers: Diane Beck, University of Illinois; Mary A. Peterson, University of Arizona; Karen Schloss, University of Wisconsin – Madison; Allison Sekuler, McMaster University

Panelists: Marisa Carrasco, New York University and Allison Sekuler, McMaster University

FoVea is a group founded to advance the visibility, impact, and success of women in vision science. To that end, we plan to host a series of professional issues workshops during lunchtime at VSS. We encourage vision scientists of all genders to participate in the workshops.

The topic of the 2017 workshop is Negotiation: When To Do It and How To Do It Successfully. Two panelists will each give a presentation, and then will take questions and comments from the audience. The remainder of the workshop time will be spent networking with other attendees. The panelists are:

• Marisa Carrasco, Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University who served as the Chair of the Psychology Department for 6 years.
• Allison Sekuler, Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour and Strategic Advisor to the President and VPs on Academic Issues, McMaster University; past Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience (2001-2011), Associate VP & Dean, School of Graduate Studies (2008-2016), and interim VP Research (2015-2016).

A buffet lunch will be available. Registration is required so the appropriate amount of food can be on hand.

Sunday, May 21

Social Hour for Faculty at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs)

Sunday, May 21, 12:30 – 2:00 pm, Royal Tern

Organizers: Eriko Self, California State University, Fullerton; Cathy Reed, Claremont McKenna College; and Nestor Matthews, Denison University

Do you work at a primarily undergraduate institution (PUI)? Do you have to find precious time for research and mentoring students among heavy teaching load? If so, bring your lunch or just bring yourself to PUI social and get to know other faculty at PUIs! It will be a great opportunity to share your ideas and concerns.

Vanderbilt-Rochester Vision Centers Party

Sunday, May 21, 7:30 – 10:00 pm, Beachside Sun Decks

Organizers: Geoffrey Woodman, Vanderbilt University and Duje Tadin, Rochester University

This event brings back the Vanderbilt-Rochester Party that began at the first VSS meetings. This social event will feature free drinks and snacks for all VSS attendees. It will provide attendees with the opportunity to socialize with members of the Rochester Center for Vision Science and the Vanderbilt Vision Research Center in attendance at VSS. This is a good opportunity to talk to potential mentors for graduate or postdoctoral training in vision science.

Monday, May 22

Applicational needs reinvent scientific views

Monday, May 22, 2:00 – 3:00 pm, Jasmine/Palm

Organizers: Katharina Rifai, Iliya V. Ivanov, and Siegfried Wahl, Institute of Ophthalmic Research, University of Tuebingen

Speakers: Eli Peli, Schepens Eye Research Institute; Peter Bex, Northeastern University; Susana Chung, UC Berkeley; Markus Lappe, University of Münster; Michele Rucci, Boston University; Jeff Mulligan, NASA Ames Research Center; Arijit Chakraborty, School of Optometry and Vision Science, University of Waterloo; Ian Erkelens, School of Optometry and Vision Science, University of Waterloo; Kevin MacKenzie, York University and Oculus VR, LCC

Applicational needs have often reinvented views on scientific problems and thus triggered break-throughs in models and methods. A recent example is augmented/virtual reality which challenges the visual system with reduced or enriched content and thus triggers scientific questions on visual system’s robustness.

Nonetheless, the driving character of applications within VSS research has not received focal attention until now. Therefore, we intend to bring together bright minds in a satellite event promoting the scientific drive created by applicational needs within VSS 2017.

Tutorial in Bayesian modeling

Monday, May 22, 2:00 – 4:30 pm, Sabal/Sawgrass

Organizer: Wei Ji Ma, New York University

Bayesian models are widespread in vision science. However, their inner workings are often obscure or intimidating to those without a background in modeling. This tutorial, which does not assume any background knowledge, will start by motivating Bayesian models through visual illusions. Then, you as participants will collectively choose a concrete experimental design to build a model for. We will develop the math of the Bayesian model of that task, and implement it in Matlab. You will take home complete code for a Bayesian model. Please bring pen, paper, and if possible, a laptop with Matlab.

Tutorial is limited to the first 50 people (first come, first-served).

The Experiential Learning Laboratory

Monday, May 22, 2:15 – 3:15 pm, Citrus/Glades

Organizers: Ken Nakayama, Na Li, and Jeremy Wilmer; Harvard University and Wellesley College

Psychology is one of most popular subjects with some the highest enrollments and at the undergraduate level. Psychology is also a science. Yet, the exposure of the undergraduate population to the actual “hands-on” practice doing such science is limited. It is rare in an undergraduate curriculum to see the kind of undergraduate laboratories that have been a longstanding tradition in the natural sciences and engineering. It is our premise that well conceived laboratory experiences by Psychology students have the potential to bring some important STEM practices and values to Psychology. This could increase the number of students who will have the sophistication to understand science at a deeper level, who will have the ability to create new knowledge through empirical investigation and who will develop the critical skills to evaluate scientific studies and claims. Critically important here is to supply conditions to engage students more fully by encouraging student initiated projects and to use this opportunity for them to gain mastery. TELLab with its ease of use and its ability to allow students to create their own experiments is what distinguishes it from other currently available systems. We invite teachers to try our system for their classes.

Tuesday, May 23

WorldViz VR Workshop

Tuesday, May 23, 1:00 – 2:30 pm, Sabal/Sawgrass

Organizer: Matthias Pusch, WorldViz

Virtual Reality is getting a lot of attention and press lately, but ‘hands on’ experiences with real use cases for this new technology are rare. This session will show what WorldViz has found to work for collaborative VR, and we will set up and try out an interactive VR experience together with the audience.

Wednesday, May 24

Honoring Al Ahumada – Al-apalooza! Talks

Wednesday, May 24, 3:00 – 5:00 pm, Horizons

Organizers: Jeff Mulligan, NASA Ames Research Center and Beau Watson, Apple

A celebration of the life, work, and play of Albert Jil Ahumada, Jr., a whimsical exploration of network learning for spatial and color vision, noise methods, models of photoreceptor positioning, etc. An afternoon session of informal talks will be open to all free of charge, followed by an evening banquet (payment required).

Full details will be posted as they are available at http://visionscience.com/alapalooza/.

Honoring Al Ahumada – Al-apalooza! Dinner

Wednesday, May 24, 7:00 – 10:00 pm, Beachside Sun Decks

Organizers: Jeff Mulligan, NASA Ames Research Center and Beau Watson, Apple

Full details will be posted as they are available at http://visionscience.com/alapalooza/.