Name: Jeremy
M Wolfe
Position:
Professor of Ophthalmology, Harvard Med.
Institution:
Visual Attention Lab, Brigham & Women’s Hospital
I would
consider serving as (check all that apply):
XX Thesis
Advisor
XX Thesis
Reader
XX Research Placement
(students interested in gaining research experience would be able to work in
your laboratory as volunteers or for course credit)
Research Interests (It is best if you can describe
specifically the kinds of projects you do that students could help work on or
the general areas of expertise in which you are willing to advise students):
Visual
Attention Lab at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
PI: Jeremy
M Wolfe: Professor of Ophthalmology, HMS
Mailing
Address:
Visual
Attention Lab
phone:
617-732-7841
FAX: 617-277-6717
email:
wolfe@search.bwh.harvard.edu
The Visual
Attention Lab does basic and applied research in visual selective attention.
There is too much visual input for the brain to fully process everything in
parallel across the visual field. If you do not believe this, try to read two
documents at the same time. Even with an appropriately HUGE font, you cannot do
this. We have three broad areas of interest. 1) Pre-attentive vision: What
visual processing occurs before attentional selection? 2) Control of selection:
How are the targets of attention chosen? and 3) Post-attentive vision: What are
the enduring consequences of attention to an object?
The bulk of
our research is basic, non-clinical work involving the study of healthy young
adults who come to our lab to participate in experiments in which stimuli are
presented on computer screens. We measure responses to simple questions like “
Did you find a red vertical bar?” and from the speed and accuracy of those
responses, we can infer details of the role of attention in the processing of
visual information. Based on these results, we build models of the operation of
human visual attention.
This basic
research may illumine applied problems from the challenges in extracting
information from medical imaging to the difficulties in finding threatening
objects in X-rays of luggage. For example, in many socially important search
tasks (e.g. routine mammography) the frequency of “targets” is very low (<
1%). How do people behave in tasks where they are correctly saying “no” all the
time? The answer appears to be that they become increasingly likely to miss a
target on the rare occasions when it does appear. Understanding the roots of
this “prevalence effect” could lead to improvements in the way we carry out
important real-world search tasks.
More
broadly, I would be happy to advise on projects concerning visual perception
and attention.