Vision Science: Reaching across disciplines

I am back from Vision Sciences, and it was a great conference. There were lots of good talks and posters, and I found some research that is relevant to my dissertation. Thankfully, nothing actually scooped my dissertation, so I don’t have to start over. Whew.

What I’ve noticed in the past few years is how broad the research has gotten at VSS. It used to be primarily behavioral research. Participants performed a task that involved some aspect of visual cognition, and accuracy, reaction time, and sometimes eye movements were recorded and analyzed. There is still a lot of this kind of research today, and it is still valuable.

In the past few years, though, there has been an explosion of neuroscience and computational modeling. A huge portion of psychological research is veering towards neuroscience, and this is the next logical step in understanding the mind and brain. Also, it gives psychological research an air of legitimacy, since we can tell our friends and family we’re neuroscientists, not psychologists. But studying the brain in conjunction with the mind makes sense.

Additionally, developing computer models to mimic and understand how visual processing takes place makes sense towards developing artificial intelligence and being able to test various theories about different phenomena. Psychologists are often not computer scientists as well, so it is promising to see links being forged between these two disciplines.

As a whole, the field has broadened beyond psychology, so the term “Vision Science” is apt. This is analogous to some schools offering a Cognitive Science program, which looks at cognition from not only a psychological standpoint, but also from philosophical, computational, and biological ones as well. Before we know it, graduate training will expand from learning experimental design to programming in MATLAB and analyzing fMRI data.