Mentor: Dr. Benjamin Wolfe
Assistant Professor
Project Description
My research focuses on how perceptual and cognitive processes let us drive safely, and how studying them in the context of driving helps reveal how our minds work. In particular, the APPLY Lab (www.applylab.org) is interested in how drivers deal with the overwhelming amount of information available to us outside the lab and behind the wheel. We study this using in-lab, video-based experiments using a range of techniques, including eye tracking, and are particularly interested in where drivers look, what they know about their environment and why, sometimes, they fail to notice important parts of the scene (like a moose on the road!). Recently, I’ve been particularly interested in how visual attention can fail – like when drivers are distracted by devices and technology in the vehicle. I collaborate with researchers in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering on these questions in applied perception and human factors and am broadly interested in questions of scene perception, visual attention, eye movements and peripheral vision.
The APPLY Lab is fundamentally a vision science lab – we’re interested in how human visual perception works, both from a fundamental and an applied perspective – and we’re always looking for students who are interested in human vision.
Mentorship Statement
My goal as a mentor is to help students understand questions deeply, develop their own questions and work towards creating new knowledge in the world, preparing them to build on their success in my lab. I do this by meeting individually with trainees, partnering more junior trainees with more senior trainees (e.g., graduate students and postdoctoral fellows), and fostering discussion in lab meetings and journal clubs. Students in my lab receive training in the core methods of experimental vision science – programming (often in MATLAB), working with high-speed eye tracking (Eyelink), working with adult participants, analyzing and interpreting data and presenting their work to in-field and more general audiences. As a researcher who is interested in how vision works outside the lab, I want to see everyone involved in the work; you might see the world differently than I do, and that’s a good thing!