Speaker: Alejandro Lleras

Title:  Parallel Peripheral Processing in Visual Search

Abstract: For the most part, cognitive psychologists have been interested in understanding capacity-limited processes in human cognition and for good reason. However, recent findings from our lab have demonstrated that there is much to learn about cognition and the brain by focusing on the temporal dynamics of unlimited capacity processes. In this talk, I will present our work on the characterization of one such type of processing: parallel peripheral processing and its role in goal directed search. Our mathematical and computational approach to this topic has allowed us to uncover new laws that govern visual search behavior, including the finding that "efficient" visual search performance is a logarithmic function of set size (not a linear one), that heterogeneous search performance can be predicted by homogeneous search performance, and, most recently, a law that states how color contrast and shape contrast combine to determine search efficiency when a visual target differs from the distractors in the display along both color and shape. 

More information on Cognitive Science Seminars can be found here.