Research

Some things are easy to find, some are difficult. When you are in a hurry to find something, you often have a difficult time finding that what you were looking for, and when you are not specifically looking for anything, you often tend to come across those things you were looking for earlier. The world of search can be quite puzzling.

How do people select those things in the environment that they want to select and why is it that sometimes certain things and objects automatically draw attention and capture your eyes. In my work, my collaborators and I have discovered that search and selection performance 1) depends on the amount of time observers take to deploy attention and move their eye movements to a location; 2) does not always depend on observers’ awareness; 3) depends on whether there is a relation of symmetry between a target and surrounding elements; 4) benefits from a short-term visual memory representation, and 5) is automatically modulated by random reward feedback.

A main theme that returns in most of my work is the idea that representations of visual information change over time. For example, when observers respond quickly, salient stimuli are prioritized in processing regardless of their task relevance. However, as time passes salience degrades and the representation changes. It becomes more sophisticated as other information, such as prior knowledge and observer goals, is integrated. In effect, visual cognition occurs through change of visual representation over time.