Visual Perception and Attention

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My lab studies the interface between human visual cognition and social-emotional processing. The methods are behavioral (psychophysics, limb movement, self-report, third-person observation), but are informed by theories based on neuroscience (electrophysiology, imaging) and neuropsychology (brain injury, disease). Two representative lines of research are outlined as examples of the projects ongoing in the UBC Vision Lab. A very exciting recent discovery is that there are emotional-evaluative consequences associated with certain patterns of eye gaze when viewing a scene. This work began by considering why Rembrandt might have been more selective than previous portrait artists in his rendering of detail (DiPaola, Riebe & Enns, Leonardo 2010) but it has expanded from there to a consideration of how relative detail can be used much more generally in pictures to implicitly guide attention (Enns & MacDonald, JEPHPP 2012). The proposed work examines the emotional consequences of the gaze patterns that are driven by the non-uniform distribution of detail in a picture. This work is important to theory development in this area, because it offers a way of testing diverse hypotheses using a common methodology that integrates eye tracking (action) with measures of experience (emotion). A second important discovery is that the unconscious motor actions that guide our reaching - the so-called autopilot of the arm - are exquisitely sensitive to the positive reward value (gain) of the visual targets guiding the reach. However, the same system's sensitivity to negative value (loss) seems much more context dependent. The proposed research will test the hypothesis that gain and loss information are available to the autopilot at different points in time (loss information is delayed), helping to shed light both on fundamental theoretical issues (e.g., why are obstacles sometimes hard to avoid when reaching) and on practical issues (e.g., why are some forms of gambling more difficult to resist).