Brian Scholl

Research in our laboratory – the Yale Perception & Cognition Lab – spans several topics in cognitive science, with a primary focus in recent work on visual cognition, and how seeing relates to (and provides a foundation for) thinking. Some of the specific topics that have excited us recently include visual awareness (including phenomena such as inattentional blindness and motion-induced blindness), the representation of the world in terms of discrete visual objects and events (with a special focus on phenomena such as object persistence, scaffolded attention, and event-type representations), the perception of seemingly higher-level properties in vision (especially involving the perception of causality, agency, and aspects of intuitive physics), and the ways in which higher-level cognition can (and cannot) influence what we see. Much of our work involves computer-based psychophysical experiments with human adults. In collaboration with several other laboratories, we are also exploring the nature of seeing in computational models, human infants, nonhuman primates, brain-damaged patients, and people with various clinical disorders.