Below are research presentations I’m involved in for Vision Sciences Society in May. If you’re attending VSS, don’t forget about the Publishing, Open Access, and Open Science satellite which will be Friday at 11am.

How many of these laws do you know? The top 15, listed below, are based on psychology journal articles 1900-1999, as calculated by Teigen (2002): LAW  (REFERENCE)

The Derrington, Krauskopf and Lennie (1984) color space is based on the Macleod-Boynton (1979) chromaticity diagram.

We discovered that when an array of colored discs was spun so fast that attention could no longer keep up with it, people could no longer perceive which colors were adjacent. Together with an additional attentional cueing experiment, this phenomenon suggests that a shift of attention is required to mentally link adjacent elements and apprehend their spatial relationship. The experiments are described in: Holcombe, A., Linares, D., &

Time is harder for humans to understand than is space. Our visual systems abound with machinery for processing extensions of space. A continuum of locations are processed in parallel, their spatial relations apprehended without cognitive effort. But for the most part, the mind represents time poorly. Our perception experience is of a very short duration- the specious present.

Applicants to the lab postdoc / advanced RA position wanna know what they’d be in for if they took the job. Below are some recent conference abstracts from the lab, along the lines of the funded project. In Multiple Object Tracking, At High Speeds One May Only Be Able To Track A Single Target—Even If No Crowding Occurs Alex Holcombe, Wei-Ying Chen

We invite applications for a research fellowship/postdoctoral research fellowship working with Dr. Alex Holcombe in the School of Psychology at the University of Sydney. The research area is visual psychophysics, and the project involves the perception and attentive tracking of moving objects. One line of experiments will investigate the limits on judging the spatial relationship of moving objects.

If you don’t understand the title of this post, you almost certainly will regret reading further. We’re doing an experiment in which one target is presented along with m distracters.

To what extent should we have confidence in the average published scientific result? The news that Professor Marc Hauser of Harvard University may have been involved in scientific misconduct, yielding irreproducible results, prompts us to reflect on whether irreproducible results are usually caught, or not.

Most people are confused about temporal resolution. That includes my students. So I created this diagram to communicate the basic concept, with the example of human visual processing, using a water-works metaphor. Why water-works? I’m trying to explain an unfamiliar concept in terms that everyone can understand intuitively.