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 on how perception interfaces with the rest of the mind.  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 (with a special focus on object persistence), the perception of seemingly higher-level properties in vision (especially involving the perception of causality and animacy), 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 children with autism spectrum disorder.