Experimental Psychology Seminar - Ruth Rozenholz, MIT : 'Visual Attention in Crisis'
EP Seminar Series 21/11/2023 : Vision science as a field must rethink the concept of visual attention. A year-long experiment of banning “attention” in our lab allowed us to rethink attention from the ground up; this talk will share some of the resulting insights - Ruth Rozenholz, MIT.
Experimental Psychology Seminar - Ruth Rozenholz, MIT : 'Visual Attention in Crisis'
21 Nov 2023, 13:00 – 15:00
Location:
B01, Chandler House
Zoom :
https://ucl.zoom.us/j/96717736528?pwd=NzQ3dy9OdlI3bGNUR0pMQkgvWnQyZz09
Meeting ID: 967 1773 6528 Passcode: 881381
Abstract :
Recent research on peripheral vision has led to a surprising and paradigm-shifting conclusion: that vision science as a field must rethink the concept of visual attention. Research has uncovered significant anomalies not explained by existing theories, and some methods for studying attention may instead have uncovered mechanisms of peripheral vision. Nor can a summary statistic representation in peripheral vision solve these problems on its own. A year-long experiment of banning “attention” in our lab allowed us to rethink attention from the ground up; this talk will share some of the resulting insights.
Ruth Rosenholtz is a Principal Research Scientist in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and a member of CSAIL. She joined MIT in 2003 after 7 years at the Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox PARC). She has a B.S. in Engineering from Swarthmore College, and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in EECS. She brings her background in electrical engineering, specifically computer vision, to the study of human vision, including visual search, perceptual organization, visual clutter, and peripheral vision. Her work focuses on developing predictive computational models of visual processing.