Brian Scholl



Associate Professor (Ph.D., 1999, Rutgers University)

Lab Page, Personal Home Page  
 
 

My lab members and I are engaged in ongoing experimental and theoretical investigations of several areas of cognitive science, with a recent focus on the study of visual perception, attention, and awareness. Three of the specific topics in this area which we are currently investigating are:

• Object Persistence
  Recent research suggests that visual attention interacts in rich and interesting ways with the underlying structure of visual scenes, in particular with their division into visual objects. Whereas vision scientists have traditionally studied the recognition of specific objects, we are using computer-based experiments to determine what can count as an attended object in the first place, and thus to determine the nature of the fundamental units over which visual attention can operate. We are also deeply interested in the nature of the visual processes which compute persisting object representations -- i.e. the representation of an object as the same individual over time and motion. This research is closely related to issues in many other areas of cognitive psychology. As one example of this, we have recently suggested that the study of the infant's "object concept" and the study of object-based attention in adults may have more to do with each other than! has been previously suspected.  
   
  
• Visual Awareness
  A more general line of inquiry concerns the nature of visual attention itself: What is it? How and when is it allocated? What is it used for? We address such questions by employing several startling phenomena in which we lose conscious awareness of various aspects of visual scenes. In sustained inattentional blindness, observers fail to perceive unexpected objects in visual scenes even though the 'missed' objects are in full view for several seconds, are in motion, and have features that differ from all other items in the display. In motion-induced blindness, salient (and even attended) objects fluctuate into and out of conscious awareness repeatedly when superimposed onto certain global motion patterns. Such phenomena allow us to explore the role of attentional selection as a 'gateway' to conscious perception, and also the nature of the processing which can occur without conscious awareness.  
   
  
• The Perception of Causality and Animacy
  We are also exploring the nature of the phenomena discovered by Michotte, Heider, and others, wherein dynamic displays consisting only of simple geometric shapes nevertheless give rise to rich percepts involving causation and animacy. Such phenomena are of particular interest because they seem to reflect primarily perceptual processing rather than higher-level inference, despite the high-level nature of the resulting interpretations. These effects emphasize that perception concerns not only a recovery of the physical structure of the world, but also a recovery of its causal and social structure. We are studying the factors which mediate these percepts, and the ways in which the perception of causality and animacy interacts with other types of visual processing.

Most, S. B., Scholl, B. J., Clifford, E., & Simons, D. J. (2005). What you see is what you set: Sustained inattentional blindness and the capture of awareness. Psychological Review, 112(1), 217 - 242.  
 
Mitroff, S. R., & Scholl, B. J. (2005). Forming and updating object representations without awareness: Evidence from motion-induced blindness. Vision Research, 45(8), 961 - 967.  
 
Turk-Browne, N. B., Junge, J. A., & Scholl, B. J. (2005). The automaticity of visual statistical learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134(4), 552 - 564.  
 
Alvarez, G. A., & Scholl, B. J. (2005). How does attention select and track spatially extended objects?: New effects of attentional concentration and amplification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134(4), 461 - 476.  
 
Endress, A. D., Scholl, B. J., & Mehler, J. (2005). The role of salience in the extraction of algebraic rules. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134(3), 406 - 419.