Welcome to the Schloss Visual Reasoning Lab! We are part of the Department of Psychology and Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, Virtual Environments Group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The lab is located on on ancestral Ho-Chunk Land as recognized in the UW-Madison Land Acknowledgment.
Our lab aims to understand how people use visual reasoning for visual communication. We study how people form associations between visual features (e.g., color, shape) and concepts, and how they use those associations to interpret meanings of visual features in information visualizations (e.g., graphs, maps, diagrams, signs). Our lab also investigates how to increase engagement in science through immersive experiences in scientific visualizations using virtual reality. Our work can be translated to making visual communication more effective and efficient.
Poster adapted from Dr. Sammy Katta after Dr. Karen Schloss took the pledge committing to continuous allyship for marginalized and underrepresented communities. Poster text reads: In this lab, we believe: science is real (microscope image), love is love (rainbow anatomical heart), Black lives matter (brown raised fist), feminism is for everyone (female symbol), trans rights are human rights (transgender flag), disabilities deserve accessibility (multiple disability symbols), immigrants are welcome (statue of liberty).
Color semantics in human cognition
More of what? Dissociating effects of conceptual and numeric mappings on interpreting colormap data visualizations. 
The UW Virtual Brain Project™: An immersive approach to teaching functional neuroanatomy
