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Brown Bag
Wednesday, Mar 13th 2013
The control of visual attention: Capture, complexity, and contingency

Shaun P. Vecera

How does attention know where to go in a complex visual scene? Theories of attentional control have divided control into a stimulus-based component and a goal-based component, and much of the literature has been devoted to debating which component is most important. Recent work from my laboratory has examined control from orthogonal directions, asking how attentional control (capture) is affected by perceptual load (complexity) and learning or experience (contingency). Our findings indicate that attentional capture can be eliminated in complex, high perceptual load displays. But a suppression of capture depends on experience, suggesting a new dimension to consider in attentional control. I hypothesize that with little experience, attentional control is stimulus driven, but control shifts to goal driven as task parameters are learned through experience with visual displays.

Brown Bag
Wednesday, Mar 27th 2013
Title TBA

James Bigelow

11:30 am - E104 Seashore Hall

Colloquium
Friday, Mar 29th 2013
If it IS broke, why not fix it? Development and quasi-randomized clinical trial of a statewide, evidence-based, ACT-based group intervention for domestic violence.

Erika Lawrence

3:30 pm - C125 Pappajohn Business Building

Brown Bag
Wednesday, Apr 3rd 2013
Title TBA

Tanja Roembke -and- Bob McMurray

11:30 am - E104 Seashore Hall

Brown Bag
Wednesday, Apr 10th 2013
Title TBA

Elise Masur, NIU -and- Janet Olson, NIU

11:30 am - E104 Seashore Hall

Colloquium
Friday, Apr 12th 2013
Building a bird’s vocabulary

Ed Wasserman

3:30 pm - C125 Pappajohn Business Building

Categorization is foundational for human language. Common nouns denote coherent collections of objects, albeit via arbitrary sounds, letters, or gestures. Nevertheless, there are ongoing debates concerning whether human word learning and categorization harness specialized mechanisms for language, as opposed to generalized associative processes. These important debates put animal models on center stage. Using a system of arbitrary visual tokens, my colleagues and I have built ever-expanding nonverbal vocabularies in pigeons through a variety of different visual categorization tasks. Pigeons have reliably categorized as many as 500 individual photographs from as many as 16 different human object categories, even without the benefit of seeing an item twice. Our formal model of categorization behavior effectively embraces 25 years of empirical evidence as well as generates novel predictions for both pigeon and human categorization. Comparative study should continue to elucidate the commonalities and disparities between human and nonhuman categorization behavior; it should also explicate the relationship between associative learning and categorization.