1. Change blindness. This phenomenon is a striking inability
of observers to notice large changes in visual stimuli whenever the change
is made simultaneously with a transient elsewhere. Originally encountered
by researchers who found that large changes could go unnoticed if made
during eye movements, I helped to discover that the cause was much more
general—namely that attention is needed to see change. This was done
by the development of a “flicker paradigm”, in which an original and changed
image were continually alternated, with a brief blank interval placed between
them. Under these conditions subjects have a very difficult time
seeing the change between the two pictures, even when the changes are large,
and the subjects are expecting them. Evidently, attention is required to
see change; without it, people will look at but not
see
the
change.
This phenomenon challenges the idea that vision involves building
up an internal picture in our heads; instead, much more dynamic representations
must be used. Also, given that attention is needed to see change,
change blindness can be used as a new source of information about
the nature of visual attention. (Take a look at some examples
of this effect!)
2. Intelligent rapid processing. Until recently, it was believed that the rapid "preattentive" processing at early levels of vision was obtained by reducing the complexity of the operations, i.e., only simple tasks—such as determining orientation or color—could be done quickly. However, work I did (with Jim Enns and Patrick Cavanagh) shows that the preattentive system is capable of much more. For example, it can recover properties of the scene, such as three-dimensional orientation and lighting direction. It can also carry out grouping, and can rapidly identify shadows and highlights In my PhD thesis, I developed a computational account of how such “intelligent” processing could obtain speed by reducing reliability slightly. In other words, much of preattentive processing has a “quick and dirty” nature; even though the processes will not succeed under all conditions, they will do so often enough.
3. Information Visualization. Some of my work has aimed at investigating new kinds of displays based on our understanding of human vision. My more recent studies have focused on various kinds of information visualization. Among other things, I applied classical measurement techniques used in visual psychophysics to displays used for information visualization (e.g. scatterplots). Results (presented at both VSS 2010 and EUROVIS 2010) show a highly linear/logarithmic behaviour (basically, the Weber and Fechner laws).
At a practical level, this allows various designs to be evaluated quickly and rigorously. Work is also underway on testing new kinds of scatterplot designs that yield more accurate perception of correlation than existing ones.
These results open up the prospect of considering visualizations as interesting stimuli for vision scientists. Similarly, it opens up the prospect of researchers in information visualization adopting a new (and more rigorous) set of tools. If these developments proceed, it will create a seamless link between workers in these two fields, which have previously remained somewhat separate.
4. The Science of Magic. During the past few years I (along with Gustav Kuhn and my former student Alym Amlani) have investigated how magic effects work. This includes the way magicians direct the attention of observers, and the way that magicians can give observers the illusion of free will. This approach has received considerable interest in the press, including a segment on CBC (Project X). A paper on this topic appeared in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2008.
5. Mindsight. Recently, I discovered that observers could sense a change, but not see it (i.e., have a visual experience of it) for several seconds. Essentially, observers can reliably feel “in their gut” that something is happening, even though they have no visual experience of it. (It should be pointed out that this effect is still mediated visually—the signal must still come in through the eyes.) In a way, this effect is similar to blindsight, except that (a) the experience is still a conscious one of “something happening”, and (b) it is obtained from normal observers rather than patients with lesions. It may be that this effect corresponds to what is commonly believed to be the “sixth sense”.