Our Research

The visual cognition lab at the University of California, Riverside is concerned with understanding the perceptual, attentional, and cognitive limitations in the performance of complex perceptual tasks. This work has three primary directions. One direction is concerned with examining perceptual tasks associated with real-world applications, specifically driving performance, with a particular focus on predicting and preventing accident risk among older drivers. To address this issue we have conducted experiments examining a wide range of perceptual tasks (e.g., steering control, collision avoidance, visual search) using a custom driving simulator coded from scratch in our lab. Our current research is examining the effectiveness of cognitive, perceptual, and attentional measures as predictors for decreased driving skill for the elderly. The second direction is concerned with examining tasks associated with the perception of scenes. Our research on this issue has included examining limitations in attention in three-dimensional displays and the role of texture in the perception of objects in scenes. The third direction examines possible interventions to age-related perceptual declines. This work has examined perceptual learning for low-level, as well as high-level visual features. Our more recent work has examined age-related changes in multimodal integration and will soon examine perceptual learning in the context of multisensory integration.

The lab's primary research is concerned with:

  • Examining a wide range age-related changes in vision, audition and the interaction between the senses.
  • Prediction and prevention of driving accidents in older individuals.
  • Studying perceptual, attentional and cognitive aspects of 3-D scene processing in younger and older individuals .
  • The exploration of possible methods to counteract age-related sensory declines.
  • Exploring age-related changes in perception from low-level visual features such as orientation discrimination to higher-level features such as texture, motion and scene perception.