Brian Scholl, PhD

Our group, the Yale Perception & Cognition Laboratory, explores how we perceive, remember, and think about the world - with a special focus on how perception interacts with (and provides a foundation for) other aspects of our mental lives. Much of our work has involved computer-based psychophysical experiments with human adults. However, in collaboration with several other laboratories, we have also explored the nature of seeing and thinking in computational models, human infants, nonhuman primates, brain-damaged patients, and children with autism spectrum disorder. Some of the specific topics that we have explored in recent work include visual awareness (including inattentional blindness and motion-induced blindness), how seeing relates to thinking (including the possibility of 'top-down' effects of cognition on perception), the perception of high-level visual properties (including causality, agency, and intuitive physics), and the perception of objects and events (including phenomena of 'scaffolded attention,' 'attentional rhythm,' and 'event-type' representations).

behavioral testing ;  eyetracking ;  psychophysics  

attention ;  cognition ;  perception ;  vision ;  working memory  

Before coming to Yale in 2001, Brian Scholl received a BA in Computer Science and Psychology from Carleton College, a PhD in Experimental Psychology from Rutgers (working with Zenon Pylyshyn), and did postdoctoral work at the Harvard Vision Sciences Laboratory (working with Ken Nakayama). He is currently Professor of Psychology, Chair of the Cognitive Science Program, and director of the Yale Perception & Cognition Laboratory.