Public Lecture: Attention and Low-level Vision, or Does visual processing change when you go hiking?

Dr Lisa Jefferies of the School of Psychology and Exercise Science will present her research on visual attention on 3 May in the Senate Conference Room, 1:30-2:30pm.

Abstract:
Our visual world is both richly complex and highly dynamic – without focused attention to guide and limit visual processing, we would be rapidly overwhelmed by a dizzying influx of information.  Visual attention, then, can be thought of as a window through which we perceive and interact with our world.  Attention is known to alter many aspects of visual perception.  Attended objects seem larger, brighter, and clearer than unattended objects, and their representations in memory are both richer and more durable.  It is unknown, however, whether attention also affects the very earliest stages of visual processing.  In this seminar we will consider a series of experiments exploring whether attention modulates low-level vision – and find out how visual processing might change when you go hiking in the mountains.