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
Color-concept associations
Quantify and explain color-concept associations
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Information Visualization
Explain how people infer meaning from visual features
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Color Preference

UW Virtual Brain Project™
Develop VR experiences to make science engaging
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News
Kushin Mukherjee awarded Kenzi Valentyn Vision Research Grant
Kushin Mukherjee was awarded a Kushin Mukherjee awarded Kenzi Valentyn Vision Research Grant from the McPherson Eye Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His...
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New publications
We are excited to announce two new papers! Mukherjee et al. presents a new theory of semantic discriminability for visual communication, and Schloss et al., is our first paper on the UW Virtual Brain Project!
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PI Karen Schloss received the 2020 Steve Yantis Early Career Award
The Psychonomic Society awarded PI Karen Schloss with the 2020 Steve Yantis Early Career award. As stated on their site: The Psychonomic Society confers scientific...
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