Our research focuses on two broad topics: visual object recognition and beauty. We primarily use psychophysical, behavioral, and computational methods to answer questions like: How does the brain recognize letters, allowing us to read? What factors affect our visual preferences?
Many of these questions arise at weekly lab meetings, where we engage in free-for-all discussions of each person's project. We’re fast-paced and collaborative, and we welcome visitors. Contact us if you’d like to join a meeting.
Object recognition
Crowding
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Crowding happens when clutter prevents object recognition. Building on the lab’s long-standing work on crowding, recent projects focus on developing and testing methods to run crowding experiments online, measuring crowding’s effect on reading in adults and through development, and understanding variability in crowding across individuals, languages, and fonts. To study crowding, we mostly rely on psychophysics, but in recent years, we’ve begun looking at the neural correlates of crowding through fMRI in collaboration with Jonathan Winawer.​
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Computer Vision
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As computer vision systems improve, it’s important to study how well their representations and behavior align with human perception. By repurposing psychophysical methods originally developed to study the brain as a black box system, our lab develops new ways to compare and contrast human and machine vision.​
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Reading
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Our lab looks at the relationship between crowding and reading, including Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) reading and ordinary reading, in adults and children. Recent work also looks at associating the size of cortical area hV4 with crowding and reading. Other projects relate subjective ratings of the reading experience to font properties and reading performance.
Beauty
Our work on beauty has spanned a range of questions, including:
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What is the relationship between beauty and pleasure? Are they empirically indistinguishable?​
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How do experiences of beauty differ across sensory modalities (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.)?
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How do beauty experiences differ from other perceptual experiences?
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How can we characterize variance in beauty judgment?
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What is the relationship between beauty and emotion?
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How do traits of individuals – like empathy and openness – affect their experience of beauty?
To answer these questions, we design experiments that ask participants to engage with stimuli like photographs of natural objects and landscapes, paintings, and pieces of music, or to describe experiences of beauty. We invite participants to rate these stimuli in terms of how much beauty they feel from them, how much they like them, what emotions the stimuli might express, etc. Then we fit models to our data to identify relationships and glean insights about the nature of beauty experience.