Welcome to the Watson Vision Lab.
We're a perceptual and cognitive neuroscience lab.
Lead by Associate Professor Tamara Watson, we want to understand why the world appears the way it does. Vision is effortless for us; we just open our eyes and feel surrounded by a rich scene. Our brain works hard for this apparently effortless experience and we want to understand some of the tricks it's pulling off!
our research.
The eyes and eye movements
Our eyes are always in motion but we're hardly ever aware of all their movements. We need our eyes to move constantly, otherwise the world would fade from view. We might 'see' the world move because we are moving our eyes around it, but we don't! The world we see is stationary! How do we see a stationary world despite our own eye motion? This is just one of the intriguing questions we're asking about eye movements.
Aesthetics
Natural stimuli are not routinely considered by researchers as aesthetic objects. To attract pollinators, flowers need to be attractive. So flowers are an excellent natural aesthetic object.
We're studying our perception of flowers to determine features of flowers that make them attractive to us. We're also interested in the role of the visual areas of the brain in generating the feeling of liking a visual stimulus.
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We're also asking
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Can we use the pupils to differentiate between cognitive load and stress?
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What do our eyes do when we blink?
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How do we explore an extended world in virtual reality