Mentor: Dr. Benjamin Wolfe
Assistant Professor
Project Description
My lab studies how we perceive the visual world and what that means for activities we do in daily life, mostly driving and reading on screens (like what you’re doing right now). Studying driver behaviour gives us a way to understand how we make consequential decisions under time pressure (the moose isn’t going to wait for you) but it also helps us investigate how we gather information from our changing environment. As a lab, our major focus is the gap which exists between the incredibly detailed visual world we exist in, and our need for a subset of that information to support what we do in the world. For the driving work, we collaborate with researchers in Engineering to tackle these problems from more fundamental and more applied perspectives. We’re particularly interested in questions in visual attention, scene perception and eye movements, and try to ask “how can we make roads safer for everyone?” We’re also interested in digital readability, or how can we use vision science to answer the question “why is this website / social media post / digital textbook easy or hard for me to read?” For this work, we’re using tools and techniques from vision science to determine what impacts your ability to read efficiently, and to better understand why the font that works for you doesn’t work for your friend. Overall, the APPLY Lab sits between fundamental perceptual and cognitive research and human factors, asking how and why we can and can’t do particular things in the world outside the lab.
Mentorship Statement
My approach to mentorship is to support my trainees as they develop the knowledge and skills to be members of the scientific community, and to provide a wide perspective about what they can do with the training they receive in my lab. My trainees are deeply involved in the research process, from talking about ideas all the way to presenting results to fellow scientists and beyond. Much of what I do is to figure out what you want and need from your time in the lab, and to support you — whether that’s preparation for graduate school and an academic career or a career in industry or the public sector. Supporting SROP is part of my focus as a mentor in fostering diversity and inclusion in research, since tackling real-world problems requires as many perspectives as we can get!