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.  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.

Projects

News

Graduate admissions for Fall 2024

Professor Karen Schloss will consider new graduate students for admission for Fall 2024. Prospective PhD students are encouraged to apply to the UW-Madison Psychology PhD...
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New Publication: More of what? Dissociating effects of conceptual and numeric mappings on interpreting colormap data visualizations

Our paper, "More of what? Dissociating effects of conceptual and numeric mappings on interpreting colormap data visualizations," was published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications....
Read more "New Publication: More of what? Dissociating effects of conceptual and numeric mappings on interpreting colormap data visualizations"

Prof. Karen Schloss received the 2023 Psychology Departmental Teaching Award

PI Karen Schloss received the 2023 Department Teaching Award for important contributions in teaching from the UW-Madison Department of Psychology. Courses: Information Visualization (Psych 711/601)...
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Featured Publications

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The UW Virtual Brain Project™: An immersive approach to teaching functional neuroanatomy

Schloss, K. B., Schoenlein, M. A., Tredinnick, R., Smith, S. Miller, N. Racey, C. Castro, C. Rokers, B.

Translational Issues in Psychological Science

Bartel
A holey perspective on Venn diagrams

Bartel, A. N., Lande, K. J., Roos, J., & Schloss, K. B.

Cognitive Science

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Color-concept association formation for novel concepts

Schoenlein, M. A. & Schloss, K. B.

Visual Cognition

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Unifying Effects of Direct and Relational Associations for Visual Communication

Schoenlein, M. A., Campos, J., Lande, K. J., Lessard, L., & Schloss, K. B.

In Press

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Context Matters: A Theory of Semantic Discriminability for
Perceptual Encoding Systems

Kushin Mukherjee, Brian Yin, Brianne E. Sherman, Laurent Lessard, and Karen B. Schloss

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics