Monday, May 19, 2025, 4:00 – 5:30 pm, Banyan Breezeway

Students and postdocs are invited to the 10th annual “Meet the Professors” event. This year’s event will follow a similar format to last year’s. There will be up to five, short, 15-minute meetings in small groups. Chat about science, VSS, career issues, work/life balance, or whatever comes up. Or just connect with a new VSS colleague.

Space will be limited and assigned on a first-come, first-served basis. Each student/postdoc will meet with five professors. See below for this year’s professors.

Registration for Meet the Professors is now closed. We will contact you in the next few weeks to let you know if you have received a slot.

Participating Professors

Benjamin Backus (Associate Professor Emeritus, Suny Optometry, now Chief Scientist at Vivid Vision) In my work at Vivid Vision, I build vision tests and treatments for VR headsets. Our visual field test is in use as an outcome measure in clinical trials of treatments for progressive eye disease, such as AMD, and our treatment for amblyopia is in a multi-site clinical trial by PEDIG at the NEI. We collaborate with scientists at medical and optometry schools and in industry. Some of our work is in low and middle income countries. I am happy to discuss how academia differs from industry.

Chris Baker (Senior Investigator, National Institutes of Health) Studies high-level vision (face, scene, body, object processing) using a wide variety of approaches including fMRI, MEG, brain stimulation (TMS, tES), and behavior (e.g. psychophysics, eye tracking).

Marlene Behrmann (Professor, University of Pittsburgh) My interest is in how the brain constructs a meaningful interpretation from the sparse (wavelength, light intensity) signals from the retina. I conduct psychophysics and neuroimaging studies in normal and brain-damaged populations to address this question, along with developing computational simulations to elucidate the mechanisms that give rise to these behavior-brain correspondences. More recently, I have also been collecting intracranial EEG data in a pediatric population to address questions about the response properties of neurons in the developing visual cortex.

Dirk Bernhardt-Walther (Associate Professor, University of Toronto) Dr. Dirk Bernhardt-Walther studies how our brains interpret complex visual scenes. His research explores the neural mechanisms of perception, using brain imaging and eye tracking to understand how we categorize visual information, recognize shapes, and experience beauty. In his work on empirical aesthetics, Dr. Bernhardt-Walther examines how we perceive and appreciate beauty in our visual world. His interdisciplinary work combines psychology, neuroscience, and computer science to reveal how we navigate and appreciate our visual world.

Kathryn Bonnen (Assistant Professor, Indiana University) Kathryn (Kate) Bonnen’s central research interests are visual perception, sensorimotor systems and the neural computations that underlie visual and sensorimotor processing. Her research relies on behavioral measurements (psychophysics, eye tracking, body motion capture) and computational modeling (of behavior, neural processing and the world). Her work strives, even in laboratory experiments, to understand the visual system and sensorimotor systems in contexts relevant to daily life (e.g., walking, balance, object tracking).

Rowan Candy (Professor, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Indiana University) We study the development of both sensory and motor visual function, grounded in the requirements of tasks in the natural environment.  Most recently, we have been asking how infants and children learn to function using desk- and head-mounted eye tracking with analyses and simulation of scene statistics.

Thérèse Collins (Professor, Université Paris Cité) My research group studies visual perception, eye movements, and object representations. I am interested in how the dimensions of mental representations relate to subjective visual experience, and how representations may change with time and experience. I use both behavioral (psychophysics & eye-tracking) and brain imaging techniques (mainly EEG).

Steven Dakin (Professor, University of Aukland) My background is in psychophysics & computational neuroscience. I started out at UCL working on basic vision (crowding, texture, faces, numerosity…) but mid-career I moved into studying vision in neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. Since 2013 my lab has been based in New Zealand where we have developed open-access eye charts for children and use consumer technology for measuring vision in and out of the clinic. I have experience of UK, US and Australasian grant systems.”

Ben de Haas (Professor, Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany) How does perception vary from one person to the next? I use eyetracking, neuroimaging and large scale samples to study the individual way in which we see the world. Why do we look at complex scenes in different ways? Why does typical adult gaze take so long to develop? Why do some of us excel at face recognition, while others struggle? And what can the answers reveal about general biological mechanisms? For recent papers and more, check out individual-perception.com

Chaz Firestone (Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins University) Chaz Firestone (Johns Hopkins University) studies how visual perception interacts (and fails to interact) with higher-level cognition, as well as how vision science interacts (and could better interact) with neighboring fields, including artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, and the philosophy of perception. At VSS, he organizes “phiVis”, a workshop bringing together vision scientists and philosophers of perception to discuss issues of interest to both.

Deborah Giaschi (Professor, University of British Columbia) My students and I study motion perception, binocular vision, and reading using psychophysics and functional MRI. We also collaborate on visuomotor and MEG projects. Our research focuses on typical development and on neurodivergent development due to amblyopia, strabismus or dyslexia. Our lab is located in the Department of Ophthalmology at BC Children’s Hospital.

Michael Grubb (Associate Professor, Trinity College (Hartford, CT)) My lab uses psychophysics and eye-tracking to study the ways in which learned associations impact the reflexive allocation and voluntary control of visual attention. As a faculty member at a primarily undergraduate institution, I place a strong focus on undergraduate research mentorship. I also welcome conversations with graduate students and postdocs who want to learn about careers at small liberal arts colleges, where teaching and research share equal priority.

Nancy Kanwisher (Professor, MIT) My research investigates  functional organization of the cortex in humans, including its development and computational basis.

J. Patrick Mayo (Assistant Professor, University of Pittsburgh) My laboratory studies the influence of eye movements on the activity of visual neurons in the primate cerebral cortex. We record from large populations of neurons in critical nodes of the brain to directly observe how visual information from the retina is transformed into adaptive commands to move the eyes. We also study the eye movement patterns of clinical populations. Our goals are to: 1) facilitate the development of clinically viable treatments of visual impairments; and 2) provide a broad foundation for understanding how the brain links perception and movements.

Ming Meng (Professor, South China Normal University) Are you curious about conducting vision research in the U.S. and China during these “interesting times”? I earned my Ph.D. from Princeton University, completed postdoctoral training at MIT, and served as a faculty member at Dartmouth College. My lab explores the neural mechanisms underlying visual cognition and attention, both with and without visual awareness. These mechanisms are linked to activity within the broader visual processing and attentional neural networks, spanning the occipital, temporal, and parietal lobes in both hemispheres. Our research sheds light on normal behavioral patterns and enhances our understanding of neurological disorders.

Anna C (Kia) Nobre (Wu Tsai Professor in Psychology, Yale University) My research investigates the proactive, dynamic, and flexible psychological and brain mechanisms for anticipating, selecting, prioritizing, and preparing visual sensory and memory representations to guide adaptive behavior. The research uses psychophysics, eye tracking, VR, neurophysiology (MEG and EEG), and brain imaging.

Michael-Paul Schallmo (Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota) The Schallmo Lab is driven to understand how psychiatric & neurodevelopmental disorders affect neural processing, using techniques from visual neuroscience.

Brian Scholl (Professor of Psychology; Chair, Cognitive Science program, Yale University) Work in our group — the Yale Perception & Cognition Lab — explores how seeing relates to (and provides a foundation for) thinking.  Specific topics we have explored lately include visual awareness (e.g. inattentional blindness and motion-induced blindness), the perception of causality and animacy (e.g. in ‘chasing’ displays), interactions between perception and intuitive physics (e.g. with properties such as gravity and support), event segmentation and ‘event type’ representations (e.g. bouncing, rolling), and time perception (including subjective time dilation and object persistence).

Anne Sereno (Professor of Psychological Sciences, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University) My research approaches range from physiology and modeling to behavior. My research topics range from eye movements, object recognition, spatial processing, and semantics (meaning) to attention and memory.

Ella Striem-Amit (Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, Georgetown University) My lab uses behavioral and fMRI techniques to study people who experienced early sensory and motor deprivation: people born blind, deaf, or without hands. This allows us to explore the principles of how our brain develops and reorganizes in relation to experience, as well as how it generalizes and represents information beyond sensory and motor specifics.

Chiahuei Tseng (Associate Professor, Tohoku University, Japan) I use psychophysical, computational, and neurophysiological tools to study the mechanisms under visual processing. My most recent interest is to extract non-verbal cues (e.g. emotion, togetherness) from body expressions. I worked in the USA and Asia (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan) as a researcher and faculty member, and I will be happy to share my experiences in these places with interested students.

Johan Wagemans (Professor in Experimental Psychology, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium) Trained in experimental psychology and psychophysics, expert in perceptual organization, also in relation with visual art and aesthetics, experience with computational modeling, fMRI, EEG, neuropsychology, and autism. Tons of experience with PhD supervision and postdoc mentoring, former VSS board member, former ECVP and VSAC organizer, chair of department, vice-dean of research, many PhD committees and review panels abroad. Former editor-in-chief of Perception and i-Perception, current editor-in-chief of Cognition and Art & Perception. Large research group funded by Flemish Government and ERC.

Alex White (Assistant Professor, Barnard College, Columbia University) My lab studies human visual perception, with an emphasis on selective attention, eye movements, and the limits of the brain’s processing capacity. Those factors play a key role in what you are doing right now: reading. Reading is one of the most important tasks for which humans use their visual systems. Using behavioral psychophysics, eye-tracking, and functional MRI, our primary goal is to investigate the feats and limitations of word recognition in the human brain.

Registration

Registration for Meet the Professors is now closed. We will contact you in the next few weeks to let you know if you have received a slot.

3MT® Competition for Students and Postdocs

Meet the Professors

Undergrad Meet & Greet

Career Transitions Workshop

Monday, May 20, 2024, 2:15 – 3:15 pm, Pirate Island

Enjoy free snacks and refreshments while you meet other undergraduates. We’ll also have a few graduate student and faculty mentors who will be happy to answer any questions about the conference, career options, or scientific interests.

All are welcome!

Monday, May 20, 2024, 3:30 – 5:00 pm, Banyan Breezeway

Students and postdocs are invited to the 9th annual “Meet the Professors” event. This year’s event will follow a similar format to last year’s. There will be up to five, short, 15-minute meetings in small groups. Chat about science, VSS, career issues, work/life balance, or whatever comes up. Or just connect with a new VSS colleague.

Space will be limited and assigned on a first-come, first-served basis. Each student/postdoc will meet with five professors.

Members of the VSS Board are indicated with an asterisk* in case you have a specific interest in talking to a member of the board.

Professors and VSS Board Members

David Alais (Professor, University of Sydney, Australia) studies multisensory perception as well as bistable perception and awareness using behavioral methods.

David Brainard (Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania) studies color vision, using psychophysical, physiological, and computational methods. He also has interests in physiological optics, retinal processing, and the role of melanopsin-mediated signals in visual processing.

Johannes Burge (Associate Professor of Psychology, Univ. of Pennsylvania) studies vision with natural images, focusing i) on tasks in optics, depth, motion perception, and ii) on how sensory, perceptual, and motor processing unfolds over time. He uses perceptual phenomena like illusions, and an array of tools—forced-choice and continuous psychophysics, image-computable ideal observers, and other modeling techniques—to understand how human vision works and how artificial vision systems should be designed to work. He interned at Adobe Inc. but didn’t like it much.

Marisa Carrasco (Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science, NYU) investigates several aspects of visual perception and attention using human psychophysics, neuroimaging, neurostimulation, and computational modeling to study the relation between the psychological and neural mechanisms involved in these processes.

Miguel Eckstein (Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences, UC, Santa Barbara) studies attention, search, eye movements, learning, face and medical image perception using psychophysics, computational modeling, and EEG/fMRI techniques. He worked at Cedars Sinai Medical Center and NASA Ames before joining UC Santa Barbara. Messi fanatic.

James Elder (Professor and York Research Chair in Human and Computer Vision and Co-Director of the Centre for AI & Society at York University, Canada). His research seeks to improve machine vision systems through a better understanding of visual processing in biological systems. He has worked at Nortel and NEC Research.

Karla Evans (Senior Lecturer, Psychology, University of York, UK) main interest lies in understanding how perceptual information within and across senses and memory gets integrated into a unified complex percept of the world and is applied to real world tasks such as cancer detection. To study these processes, she uses a variety of techniques from psychophysics, neuroimaging to machine learning.

Krystel Huxlin* (Professor of Ophthalmology, University of Rochester) investigates visual system plasticity with an eye towards restorative potential in adult brains with cortical damage. This is done in both humans and animal models, with approaches including psychophysics, neuroimaging, neurostimulation, cell biology, quantitative microscopy and molecular techniques.

Janneke Jehee (Principal Investigator, Donders Institute, Netherlands) studies perceptual decision-making under uncertainty using a range of techniques, including neuroimaging, computational modeling, and psychophysics. She is also involved in the development of new methods for analyzing behavioral and neuroimaging data.

Kendrick Kay (Assistant Professor of Radiology, University of Minnesota)’s research interests lie at the intersection of visual/cognitive neuroscience, functional magnetic resonance imaging methods, and computational neuroscience. His lab combines expertise across different disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, neuroimaging, statistics, machine learning, and software engineering.

Talia Konkle (Professor of Psychology, Harvard University) studies high-level visual representation and cortical organization, combining modern deep neural network models with functional magnetic resonance imaging and behavioral methods.

Rich Krauzlis* (Senior Investigator, National Eye Institute, NIH) studies the brain circuits for eye movements and higher-order visual functions (e.g., attention, perception, and object recognition) using psychophysics in humans and combinations of physiological, optogenetic, and psychophysical methods in animal models. He is especially interested in how higher-order visual functions are linked to goal-directed behavior, and how the properties of brain circuits change as we explore and learn about our visual world.

Michael Landy* (Professor of Psychology and Neural Science, NYU) has studied a wide range of topics, including depth perception, sensory cue integration, spatial vision including texture perception, perceptual decision-making, Bayesian models of all of the above, cortical adaptation and metacognition for both perceptual and motor tasks.

Cheryl Olman (Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Minnesota) uses a mixture of behavior, computational models, and functional MRI to study how our brains creates our visual experiences. After 20 years, she’s still stuck on the problem of how visual representations of textures get suppressed when they’re embedded in complex environments. The problem is more interesting than one might think, and fMRI is less informative on this topic than one might hope.

Mary A. Peterson (Professor of Psychology, University of Arizona) uses behavioral and physiological methods to study foreground object detection; in particular influences of memory and context; and semantic activation, competition, and recurrent processing during object detection.

Martina Poletti (Assistant Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester) investigates the interplay of action, attention and eye movements, vision across the foveola, fine tuning of attention and eye movements at the foveal scale and the relationship between fine oculomotor behavior, retinal anatomy and visual acuity, using high-precision eyetracking, high-resolution retinal imaging, psychophysics, gaze contingent display control and EEG.

Martin Rolfs* (Professor for Experimental Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) investigates the architecture and plasticity of processes in active perception and cognition, using a broad range of methods including eye and motion tracking, psychophysics, computational modeling, EEG, studies of clinical populations, and robotics.

Pawan Sinha (Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, MIT) studies visual neuroscience, combining experimentation and computational modeling. He majored in computer science in India and then came to the US planning to specialize in high-performance processor design. But, due partly to his interest in visual art, he soon changed his research focus to visual neuroscience. His lab is exploring the development of visual skills in typically developing children, as well as those who have gained sight after suffering several years of congenital visual deprivation. This effort, named Project Prakash, allows the lab to simultaneously pursue the twin goals of scientific discovery as well as societal service.

Miriam Spering (Associate Professor of Neuroscience, University of British Columbia) investigates how humans interact with their sensory environment through eye and hand movements using human psychophysics, eye tracking and motion capture in healthy adults and patients with movement disorders. She is passionate about supporting students and postdocs and enabling them to identify careers that best suit their interests and values.

Viola Störmer (Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth University) investigates selective attention, visual working memory, and cross-modal perception using a combination of behavioral methods, EEG, and computational modeling.

Bill Warren (Chancellor’s Professor of Cognitive Science, Brown University) uses virtual reality techniques to investigate the visual control of action, including optic flow, locomotion, collective behavior, and visual navigation. He has had an academic career and collaborated with movement scientists on visual-motor coordination, with biologists on insect flight control, with computer scientists on crowd dynamics, and with safety researchers on emergency evacuation.

Takeo Watanabe (Fred M. Seed Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences at Brown University) takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying vision using psychophysics, fMRI, and computational neural modeling. Research areas include motion perception, interaction of motion and form, attention and perceptual learning.

Yaoda Xu (Senior Research Scientist, Department of Psychology, Yale University) studies the cognitive and neural mechanisms supporting visual working memory, attention, and visual object processing in the human brain with a particular focus on the posterior parietal cortex using methods including fMRI, psychophysics and computational modeling.

Registration

Registration for Meet the Professors is now closed. We will contact you in the next few weeks to let you know if you have received a slot.

• A student may submit only one abstract to the Just-In-Time session.
• The student must be a current VSS member (for 2024).
• The student must be registered to attend VSS.
• Those who already have an abstract accepted for VSS 2024 are not eligible to submit to the Just-In-Time session.
• Abstracts must be work that has not been accepted for publication or published at the time of submission.
• Poster presenter substitutions are not permitted.

Monday, May 22, 2023, 2:30 – 3:30 pm, Banyan/Citrus

Enjoy free snacks and refreshments while you meet other undergraduates. We’ll also have a few graduate student and faculty mentors who will be happy to answer any questions about the conference, career options, or scientific interests.

All are welcome!

The Vision Sciences Society announces the 2020-2021 inaugural members of The Student-Postdoc Advisory Committee (SPC)!

The Student-Postdoc Advisory Committee will advise the VSS Board and membership about how events, workshops, meeting structure, and activities can best target the needs of trainee members and attendees. They will be reaching out to trainees to solicit opinions and ideas, as well as organizing special events.

Each year VSS will solicit nominations for new members of the Student-Postdoc Advisory Committee to replace three members who will be rolling off the Committee.

Stacey Aston

Durham University

Stacey Aston is a postdoctoral researcher in Durham University’s Psychology Department. In her research, she studies visual and multi-sensory information integration for human perception and decision making. Stacey joined SPC to have a positive impact on the VSS experience for student and postdoc members. She is sure that the newly formed SPC committee will be a valuable asset to the VSS team as they work to enrich the VSS program with many more development and networking opportunities.

Kathryn Bonnen (Chair)

New York University

Kathryn (Kate) Bonnen is a Simons Society postdoctoral fellow at New York University (NYU). She earned her bachelor’s degrees in computer science and psychology at Michigan State University and received a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to NYU, she was an ARVO/VSS scholar and visiting researcher in the Optometry School at the University California Berkeley. Her research focuses on motion perception, behavioral modelling, binocular processing, and sensorimotor control.

Matthew Boring (Record Keeper)

University of Pittsburgh

Matthew Boring is a fourth year PhD student from the University of Pittsburgh. He studies in Dr. Avniel Ghuman’s Laboratory of Cognitive Neurodynamics to understand how visual representations of objects evolve in the ventral stream and how these representations influence visual attention. Within the Student Postdoc Advisory Committee, Matthew is excited to improve VSS for trainees by establishing channels of communication between students, postdocs, and VSS organizing committees. By better understanding the desires and concerns of trainee members, it will be easier to develop programs that improve the value of VSS to them.

Cristina Ceja

Northwestern University

Cristina Ceja is a graduate student at Northwestern University pursuing a PhD in Psychology. She is interested in exploring the limits of our visual system in perceiving, processing, and updating visual representations. Currently, she studies how the visual system binds features to objects, and the role of visual attention in this binding process. As a member of the Student-Postdoc Advisory Committee (SPC), she looks forward to building on her existing outreach efforts and committee work dedicated to engaging and advocating for trainees.

Björn Jörges

York University

Björn finished his PhD at University of Barcelona and is currently doing a PostDoc at York University, Toronto, in a project funded by the Canadian Space Agency. His research is focused on the role of vestibular cues for visual perception and how we perceive moving objects while we ourselves are moving through the environment. He is furthermore convinced that open and diverse science is better science.

J. Brendan Ritchie (VSS Liaison)

National Institute of Mental Health

J. Brendan Ritchie, Ph.D, is a post-doctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the National Institute of Mental Health (USA), where he is conducting research on the neural basis of visual categorization and category learning. Previously he was a post-doctoral fellow at KU Leuven (Belgium), a research associate at Macquarie University (Australia), and a graduate student at the University of Maryland (USA), where he obtained his doctoral degree. Brendan is excited to be a part of SPC, and wants to help make VSS more responsive to the interests of early career researchers in vision science.

Monday, May 22, 2023, 3:30 – 5:00 pm, Banyan Breezeway

Students and postdocs are invited to the 8th annual “Meet the Professors” event. This year’s event will follow a similar format to last year’s. There will be up to five, short, 15-minute meetings in small groups. Chat about science, VSS, career issues, work/life balance, or whatever comes up. Or just connect with a new VSS colleague.

Space will be limited and assigned on a first-come, first-served basis. Each student/postdoc will meet with five professors. If you would like to attend Meet the Professors, please complete this Registration Form. Registration will close on April 21, 2023, or when all spaces are filled. See below for this year’s professors.

Members of the VSS Board are indicated with an asterisk* in case you have a specific interest in talking to a member of the board.

Professors and VSS Board Members

David Alais (Professor, University of Sydney, Australia) studies multisensory perception as well as bistable perception and awareness using behavioral methods.

Brian Anderson (Associate Professor, Texas A&M University) studies how the control of attention is influenced by learning, using behavioral and cognitive neuroscience methods. His academic journey began as a part-time community college student.

Ben Balas (Professor, North Dakota State University) studies visual recognition in children and adults, with an emphasis on the role of experience in shaping face and texture recognition. He uses behavioral and computational methods and also uses EEG and eye-tracking in his research.

David Brainard (Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania) studies color vision, using psychophysical, physiological, and computational methods. He also has interests in physiological optics, retinal processing, and the role of melanopsin-mediated signals in visual processing.

Johannes Burge (Associate Professor of Psychology, Univ. of Pennsylvania) studies vision with natural images, focusing i) on tasks in optics, depth, motion perception, and ii) on how sensory, perceptual, and motor processing unfolds over time. He uses perceptual phenomena like illusions, and an array of tools—forced-choice and continuous psychophysics, image-computable ideal observers, and other modeling techniques—to understand how human vision works and how artificial vision systems should be designed to work. He interned at Adobe Inc. but didn’t like it much.

Marisa Carrasco (Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science, NYU) investigates several aspects of visual perception and attention using human psychophysics, neuroimaging, neurostimulation, and computational modeling to study the relation between the psychological and neural mechanisms involved in these processes.

Monica Castelhano (Professor, Queen’s University) studies how context and real-world knowledge affects perceptual processes, memory and attention and visual search. In her research, she uses a variety of methodologies including EEG, eye movements and virtual realtity to examine behavior in virtual environments.

Sang Chul Chong (Professor, Yonsei University) studies ensemble perception, visual awareness, and attention, using psychophysics and eye tracking.

Miguel Eckstein (Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara) studies attention, search, eye movements, learning, face and medical image perception using psychophysics, computational modeling, and EEG/fMRI techniques. He worked at Cedars Sinai Medical Center and NASA Ames before joining UC Santa Barbara. Messi fanatic.

James Elder (Professor and York Research Chair in Human and Computer Vision and Co-Director of the Centre for AI & Society at York University). His research seeks to improve machine vision systems through a better understanding of visual processing in biological systems. He has worked at Nortel and NEC Research and is co-founder of the AI start-up AttentiveVision.

Marc Ernst (Head of Applied Cognitive Psychology, Ulm, Germany) has a background in Physics and Cognitive Science. He worked at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, UC Berkeley, and at Bielefeld and Ulm University. His research interests are in multisensory perception and action (vision, touch, audition, vestibular, navigation, grasping), perceptual-motor learning, Human-Machine Interaction, and VR. Studies use both behavioral and computational modeling methods.

Debbie Giaschi (Professor, Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, University of British Columbia) studies motion perception, binocular vision and reading in children and adults using psychophysics and MRI techniques. She is particularly interested in atypical development due to amblyopia or dyslexia.

Todd Horowitz (Program Director, Basic Biobehavioral & Psychological Sciences, NCI) is a cognitive psychologist, with a B.S. from Michigan State University (1990) and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (1995). From 1995 to 2012, he worked at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He started as a post-doc with Jeremy Wolfe and then in 2000 was promoted to the faculty. He spent 12 years as a soft-money Principal Investigator before moving to the National Cancer Institute, where he is now a Program Director (i.e., program officer) in the Division Cancer Control and Population Sciences. He has published more than 80 peer-reviewed research papers. Currently, he is working to engage cognitive psychologists and vision scientists with problems in cancer control, such as improving medical image interpretation, studying the cognitive effects of cancer and cancer treatments, and improving the effectiveness of visual health communications.

Kendrick Kay (Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota)’s research interests lie at the intersection of visual/cognitive neuroscience, functional magnetic resonance imaging methods, and computational neuroscience. His lab combines expertise across different disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, neuroimaging, statistics, machine learning, and software engineering.

Michael Landy* (Professor of Psychology and Neural Science, NYU) has studied a wide range of topics, including depth perception, sensory cue integration, spatial vision including texture perception, perceptual decision-making, Bayesian models of all of the above, cortical adaptation and metacognition for both perceptual and motor tasks.

Sam Ling (Associate Professor, Boston University) uses psychophysics and brain imaging techniques to investigate the neural mechanisms that support basic vision, as well as to understand how early visual processes change in response to top-down signals, such as attention, learning, arousal and memory.

Rob McPeek (Professor, SUNY College of Optometry) studies eye movements, attention, and visual search in humans and monkeys, using behavioral and neural recording techniques. He formerly worked at The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute.

Mary A. Peterson (Professor of Psychology and Director of the Cognitive Science Program, University of Arizona) uses behavioral experiments, neuroimaging, and patient work to examine the factors that influence perceptual organization, in particular, the detection of foreground objects against backgrounds. She is a proponent of women in STEM and of interdisciplinarity as exemplified by Cognitive Science.

Pawan Sinha (Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, MIT) studies visual neuroscience, combining experimentation and computational modeling. He majored in computer science in India and then came to the US planning to specialize in high-performance processor design. But, due partly to his interest in visual art, he soon changed his research focus to visual neuroscience. His lab is exploring the development of visual skills in typically developing children, as well as those who have gained sight after suffering several years of congenital visual deprivation. This effort, named Project Prakash, allows the lab to simultaneously pursue the twin goals of scientific discovery as well as societal service.

Viola Störmer (Assist. Prof., Dartmouth College) studies multisensory perception, in particular how sounds affects vision, selective attention, and working memory. Her lab uses a range of techniques to investigate these topics including psychophysics, experimental psychology, and EEG.

Bill Warren (Chancellor’s Professor of Cognitive Science, Brown University) uses virtual reality techniques to investigate the visual control of action, including optic flow, locomotion, collective behavior, and visual navigation. He has had an academic career and collaborated with movement scientists on visual-motor coordination, with biologists on insect flight control, with computer scientists on crowd dynamics, and with safety researchers on emergency evacuation.

Takeo Watanabe (Fred M. Seed Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences at Brown University) takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying vision using psychophysics, fMRI, and computational neural modeling. Research areas include motion perception, interaction of motion and form, attention and perceptual learning.

Yaffa Yeshurun (Professor of Psychology at the University of Haifa) is interested in the interplay between spatial and temporal attention and various aspects of visual perception, including spatial and temporal resolution, internal noise, motion perception, perceived duration, spatial crowding and temporal crowding, relying mainly on behavioral measurements, but also pupillometry and occasionally computational modeling.

Registration

Please use our online Meet the Professors Registration Form. Online registration closes on April 21, 2023.