Hey there! It’s hard to believe that it’s been five+ years since the lab kicked off in August 2019. We’ve overcome some pandemic-related challenges to get our research off the ground, and the lab is now buzzing, with plenty to share! The research we do is guided by a few foundational questions:
How much of peripheral vision do we actually perceive?
Funded by a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research, my research group is currently investigating how attention and metacognitive biases shape perception of the visual periphery. Previous work that I have conducted indicates we might think we see more of the periphery than we really do, in not only settings with simple visual stimuli, but more naturalistic environments, too. We have published some recent work exploring color perception in the periphery, and my graduate students Joseph Pruitt and Trevor Caruso have conducted interesting work on this topic, with Joey’s new published work found here, and Trevor having much more to say about it soon.
Overall, psychological research has provided conflicting evidence on whether we perceive the visual periphery in a high degree of detail. Studies demonstrating change blindness and inattentional blindness indicate that we see very little. But other studies indicate we actually see quite a bit, and that perceptual deficits are driven by processing bottlenecks in memory attention. The lab is fortunate to have funding from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to replicate and extend work on change blindness to test ideas related to the Higher Order Theory of consciousness. Specifically, we are investigating how eye movements influence visual change detection abilities to better understand our subjective experience of peripheral vision. Led by Francis Fallon (SJU), the research group includes David Rosenthal (CUNY), Andrew Haun (UW-Madison), and Alan Lee (Lingnan University, Hong Kong).
What principles govern how our brains integrate sensory information?
We also study how the brain combines information from our auditory and visual modalities to produce coherent perception of the world. These studies investigate how things like attention and metacognition interact with our brain’s remarkable capacity to perform sensory inferences.
Undergraduate researchers in the lab have helped drive this work forward recently, including work exploring confidence judgments in multisensory speech perception and the sound-induced flash illusion. Previously, I’ve used computational models to study sensory integration, probing priors which influence how we combine audiovisual signals. I’ve found that these priors are stable over time, change with specific types of experience, and might be related to positive symptoms of schizophrenia. This focus on understanding multisensory computation has led to a recent collaboration with the Rahnev lab at Georgia Tech to explore whether common computations might underlie both multisensory cue combination and metacognition. We’re very interested to see where this work goes in the future!
What is the relationship between perception and imagination?
Saurabh Ranjan, my first graduate student, has published his first study on how the brain distinguishes between what is perceived and what is imagined. You can find this first manuscript on reality monitoring here. He has also published a short commentary on the new HeXaGen model of visual imagery here.
How does the brain produce conscious experience?
Lastly, I do some writing about conscious visual experience. For example, I think you need prefrontal cortex to have conscious visual experiences, and that we shouldn’t be so quick to write off certain theories based on a selective review of the literature. Others disagree. I have also written with some collaborators about the utility of scientific paradigms that match performance across conditions to probe consciousness. This in addition to writings about where we might find consciousness in the brain, as well as the relevance of paradigms like binocular rivalry for consciousness research. Debates surrounding controversial ideas about consciousness have grown particularly lively, following release of this letter in September 2023. I posted about why I signed it on Twitter, and you can find my public statement on it all at this link, which I’ll leave up permanently, whatever happens to the letter itself.