Research in the Icelandic Vision Lab covers a wide field of topics. Here are some examples.
Table of Contents
Dimensions of Object Perception
What are the dimensions on which objects differ visually and semantically from one another? How does this affect the organizational principles of object perception, as evidenced by individual differences in behavior, special abilities and disabilities, and developmental trajectories?
People mainly involved in this project:
Predictors of Reading Problems
Mounting evidence from our lab suggests that people with dyslexia have very specific problems with tasks that are thought to rely on the workings of high-level regions of the visual system. We are conducting further behavioral and neural studies on the role of visual and non-visual factors in reading problems, including longitudinal measurements on beginning readers and prereaders to see what predicts reading development. Collaborators include: Freyja Birgisdóttir (University of Iceland) and Randi Starrfelt (University of Copenhagen).
People mainly involved in this project:
Redundancy masking and crowding in the visual periphery
While only the central 5°of the visual field around fixation can be perceived with high acuity, perception does not fade into darkness in the periphery. Reading, driving and most day-to-day interactions require recognition of peripheral objects. However, recognition is greatly impaired when objects are presented in clutter, especially in the visual periphery, a mechanism called visual crowding. Crowding therefore, sets the boundary conditions to object recognition and the ability to identify objects. It strongly impacts most everyday actions, including reading, eye movements and driving. It has important clinical implications for patients with macular degeneration or amblyopia. This project examines object recognition in the visual periphery, attempting to map object appearance across the entire visual field.
Synesthesia – Learning, Memory & Cognition
Synesthesia is a non-clinical condition in which people’s experiences of environmental stimuli elicit an automatic and consistent subjective experiences. The most common types of synesthesia are when a presentation of weekdays or months, letters, digits, or musical notes elicit a vivid experience of color, in the absence of any physical color stimulation. The experiences are often described as a sort of augmented reality, where normal perceptions are enriched with non-physical experiences of color, sounds, tastes or smells. With advances in cognitive neuroscience, synesthesia has captured the imagination of scientist interested in understanding the neuro-cognitive mechanisms underlying the peculiar phenomenon, and how this might affect behavior. The Icelandic Vision Lab has partnered with Dr. Thomas Alrik Sørensen, PI at the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, Aalborg University, to investigate how synesthetic associations are formed in brain, how they affect attention and memory, and how they are similar – as well as distinct from – visual and conceptual expertise. The research is supported by a grant from The Independent Research Fund Denmark, awarded to Dr. Sørensen. Readers interested in synesthesia, and those who may experience synesthesia can visit our website where they can fill out our survey, contact researchers for participation in the research or ask questions about the subject matter.
Árni was interviewed on Icelandic Public Radio, Rás 1, about synesthesia and related research. Listen here (Icelandic; 16th April, 2018).
People mainly involved in this project:
Visual Imagery
“I used to be a hyperphant… I had a stroke in 2017 which left me with memory impairment… and aphantasia. I noticed immediately that my memories were gone and I knew something else was wrong, but it took a while to figure out that I’d lost my mind’s eye. It’s been devastating to me. I’ve lost my job and career, my sense of identity.”
– Anonymous, shared with permission
The person above has first-hand experience with two extremes of human imagination. Those with hyperphantasia have highly detailed and nearly photo-realistic visual imagery while those with aphantasia are unable to visualize at all – they have a blind mind‘s eye. We are interested in these extremes of human imagination and their relation to other cognitive abilities such as visual perception and visual memory. Collaborators include: Vaka Vésteinsdóttir (University of Iceland) and Thomas Alrik Sørensen (Aalborg University).
People mainly involved in this project:
Visual Statistics
Some of our research involves the representations of statistical variation in artificial displays and natural scenes. Recent evidence from our lab shows that observers can have a remarkably detailed representation of the distributions of stimuli in the environment. This work combines the disciplines of summary statistics, visual attention and sequential dependencies and priming in vision in addressing how we represent featural variation in the visual environment. The project involves behavioral studies, computational modeling, and neurophysiological studies. This project is done in collaboration with Dr. Andrey Chetverikov (Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Netherlands) and Dr. Gianluca Campana (University of Padova, Italy).
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