Science
My PhD at Harvard was in perception and cognition. Most of my research asks what people can and cannot see, and why. Two of the findings are below in a form you can try.
Try it: crowding
You can see more than you can pick out
In 1996, Sheng He, Patrick Cavanagh, and I showed in Nature that the grain of attention is much coarser than the grain of vision. You can see things that you cannot pick out one at a time.
Click anywhere on the gray to move the cross there. Keep your eyes on the cross. Without looking over, decide which way the middle patch on the right tilts. With its neighbors close, most people find it hard to judge, though they can see it is there. Slide the spacing wider and it gets easier. This is the classic crowding demo, redrawn; it is not a figure from the paper.
Or watch it change
Keep your eyes on the cross. Every three to five seconds the middle patch turns to a new angle, and its contrast shifts a little. Press "I saw it change" (or the space bar) as soon as you notice. The table keeps your hits and your middle reaction time for each setting, so you can compare still neighbors with moving ones, and see whether neighbors that change just before or just after the middle one hide its change more. This is an informal measure on your own screen, not a lab result.
Or measure it
This sweep uses the Psi method (Kontsevich and Tyler, 1999). After every answer it updates its estimate of the turn you judge as straight (the PSE) and of how much turn you need to tell left from right reliably (the JND, shown as the spread, sigma, of a cumulative Gaussian), and it picks the next turn to learn the most. Each trial starts with the middle patch upright. A moment later it turns a little and stays turned, and you say which way. The neighbors change at a set time before or after it, and one setting keeps them still for comparison. This is an informal measure on your own screen, not a lab result, and it only works if you keep your eyes on the cross.
My thesis paper, "The spatial resolution of visual attention" (Cognitive Psychology, 2001, with Patrick Cavanagh), maps how finely attention can select across the field of view.
- Nature 383, 334 to 3371996. "Attentional resolution and the locus of visual awareness." He, Cavanagh, and Intriligator. Read it
- Cognitive Psychology2001. "The spatial resolution of visual attention." Intriligator and Cavanagh.
Try it: wakes and spokes
Spokes and wakes that are not there
With Alex Holcombe, Peter Tse, Stephen Macknik, and Adriane Seiffert, I published new illusions in Perception (1999) and in Perception and Psychophysics (2000), in which moving discs make brightness appear where there is none: discs circling the point you look at seem to pull dark spokes toward it and to leave wakes behind them. In 2000 we showed that the spokes fade as the discs approach the brightness of the background.
Keep your eyes on the cross and watch the gray between it and each disc, and behind each disc. Then change the speed, the count, and the background. Each version is my redrawing, not an original stimulus. The gray between the spokes is always one flat value on your screen, so any light or color you see in a spoke's wake comes from your own visual system. The wheel stops by itself after thirty seconds.
Other findings
A patient with cortical color blindness could still see motion carried only by color. Nature Neuroscience 1(3), 242 to 247.
Two papers on a patient with a posterior callosal lesion, whose two hemispheres read in different ways: "Two different readers in the same brain" and "Able to name, unable to compare," both in NeuroReport. I did this work as a Visiting Scholar at INSERM in Lyon, 1994 to 1995.
Attended events seem to last longer. Perception and Psychophysics.
A real-time method for making random-dot motion displays with a set coherence. Spatial Vision, sole author.
With Stephen Kosslyn, an argument against single-method science: "Is cognitive neuropsychology plausible? The perils of sitting on a one-legged stool." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. It was translated into Italian in 1994.
Neurology research at Beth Israel with Jason Barton and others, on eye movements, face recognition, schizophrenia, and blindsight.
About a dozen papers in space physics with D. S. Intriligator at the Carmel Research Center, on the solar wind and on Voyager data at the edge of the solar system.
Consumer neuroscience at Bangor: brand logos bias emotion-based learning (Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2012); a go/no-go task reveals brand influence (PLoS ONE, 2015); and "Quick as a BLINK," a fast version of the Iowa Gambling Task (2011).
Players of online role-playing games who report hostility also report cognitive and social benefits, depending on the role they play. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.
Chimpshop: science turned into a game
At Bangor I founded and directed a spin-out, Attention Retraining Technologies, starting in 2013. Its phone game, Chimpshop, retrains attention away from images of alcohol. Players run down supermarket aisles while chimps throw products at them.
The research idea is W. Miles Cox's. My part was turning it into an app. The UK Technology Strategy Board and the NHS funded it, and we wrote it up as "Chimpshop and alcohol reduction" in Perspectives in Public Health in 2015. Bangor's news story
My papers are listed on Writing and talks.