Participating in the preparation of a draft design of a full study.Participating in the design and execution of pilot studies.Taking part in the preparation of stimulus materials.Suggesting a rough design for an experiment.Understanding the initial motivating ideas behind the research.The research internship program was designed to familiarize students with the steps involved in developing a research project, including: In particular, we will test a number of ideas concerning what limits the number of objects that can be tracked (to about 4 or 5).
In the present series of studies, we will examine certain factors that affect this ability. Over 20 papers have been published using variants of this method. This technique has proven useful for exploring a range of questions concerning human visual information processing. Using MOT, we have shown that people can normally keep track of about four or five moving objects, even when they are mixed in with four other identical moving objects.
One of the primary techniques used in this laboratory is called Multiple Object Tracking or MOT, a procedure which requires subjects to track several objects (the Targets) displayed on a screen which move randomly and independently among a set of identical moving Nontargets that must be ignored. The experiments currently being carried out in this laboratory investigate the nature of visual attention and study people’s ability to split their visual attention among several objects or locations. This internship program is conducted under the supervision of Professor Zenon Pylyshyn. This theory has broad application to many different phenomena involving visual perception and mental imagery. The theoretical perspective behind this work is called the Visual Indexing Theory.
The Visual Attention Laboratory (VAL) conducts experimental and theoretical investigations in order to better understand some of the bottlenecks in human visual information processing, especially as these pertain to people’s ability to visually attend to several things at once.