The Visual Cognition Program

For most people, vision is critical to comprehend their surroundings. Yet how is this abstract visual data processed into useful and meaningful information? The Visual Cognition Project aims to investigate the complex task of processing visual information.

Our main concerns within the Visual Cognition Project are with research on the rapidly presented visual stimuli and with research on face processing.

RSVP and Other Brief Presentation Paradigms

Our research investigates higher-level visual processes when visual information is presented briefly. By limiting the time that people can see different types of visual stimuli (e.g., digits, letters, words, pictures of objects or faces), we are able to ascertain what information is rapidly processed and what information is lost. We have used various techniques such as divided attention tasks and rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) which involves the presentation of a variety of stimuli sequentially in the same place for about a tenth of a second each.

We study the cognitive phenomena of repetition blindness and the attentional blink, which both reflect difficulties in detecting and reporting pairs of stimuli appearing closely in time. Repetition blindness refers to a failure to detect or report both of a repeated pair of items; whereas the attentional blink is an inability to detect a new target for a short time after the first target is presented. The study of these effects can reveal early stages of visual information processing and storage because the difficulties described do not occur with longer exposure durations (>200 ms).

Some of our research also investigates masked priming, where a very briefly presented item (not available to conscious thought) can influence how we process subsequently presented visual stimuli.

Read about RSVP and Masked Priming Research at MACCS.

 

Face Processing

How do people perceive and recognize faces and facial expressions? To help us understand this we have been studying people with prosopagnosia and epilepsy.

Prosopagnosia (or face blindness) refers to a selective difficulty in recognizing familiar people by their faces. Individuals with prosopagnosia are typically able to acknowledge that a face is present, but are unable to identify it. Prosopagnosia is often the consequence of brain damage (e.g. traumatic brain injury or stroke) in adulthood or childhood.

Our research investigates how individuals with prosopagnosia process faces and other types of visual information such as objects and letters. Also we are interested in how face processing skills develop during childhood in individuals with and without prosopagnosia.

People with temporal lobe epilepsy experience seizures in one of the temporal lobes. These seizures disrupt the normal pattern of electrical activity in the brain, for these people it occurs in the temporal lobes which are involved in vision, hearing, memory and emotion. Our current research investigates whether people with temporal lobe epilepsy, especially those who experience a feeling of fear immediately before or during their seizures, rate visual images similarly to other people.

Read more about Face Research at MACCS.

 

Synaesthesia

Synaesthesia is one of the most fascinating phenomena in the field of cognitive neuroscience. It is a condition in which the perception of a stimulus in one sense (e.g., sound) gives rise to an additional perceptual experience, either in the same, or a different modality (e.g., colour). For example, a synaesthete may perceive each letter of the alphabet as a distinct colour, or may experience certain tastes when touching particular objects.

At MACCS we use a number of different techniques (questionnaires, computer-based testing, and non-invasive brain imaging) to investigate synaesthesia. This allows us to ask important questions about human cognition, mechanisms of attention, perceptual binding and consciousness.

Read more about Synaesthesia Research at MACCS.