People can identify words, letters, shapes, and objects quickly and effortlessly.
Although these are ostensibly simple tasks, they require tremendous perceptual and cognitive processing. The simple fact is that we can look at the figure below and recognize it as a telephone even though we have never seen this exact telehpone. Research in the lab centers on how people process and combine new perceptual information with pre-existing knowledge such that they can reach these quick, effortless decisions about the world around them. We study memory, attention, perception, categorization, and letter recognition. We are looking for a few bright and motivated undergraduate research assistants.