Vision Sciences 2008

I am at the Vision Sciences Society conference right now in Naples, FL. It’s my fourth VSS, and the presentations are of high quality and the beaches are of the same high standard. I’m presenting two posters at the conference.

The first is a study I’m doing with my labmates and Carl Smith (Evaluating Design) looking at eye movements in experts and novices while they view a movie of the first-person shooter Quake 4 and have to detect targets. The big picture is that more experienced players make fewer eye movements for longer periods of time. This reflects previous research that suggests experts have a larger functional field of view, so they can extract more information from the periphery than novices.

The second poster are a series of studies I worked on with my advisor and another faculty member at George Mason University. We examined the effect of holding similar and dissimilar items in working memory to determine how the capacity of visual working memory changed when you had to remember sets of items from different categories. The interesting result is that remembering 2 objects from 2 separate categories (4 total object) led to higher working memory capacity than 4 objects from a single category, but only if faces were part of the two-category set. This is not due to a general “faces are special” effect, as memory capacity for two or four faces alone was never greater than memory for other object classes.

As I attend other interesting talks and posters, I hope to write about them here. Stay tuned!