Dr. Anna Bartel graduated with her PhD from the UW-Madison Department of Psychology!
We were honored to have Anna as a member of the lab, and we wish her all the best in her next steps as an Efficacy and Impact Researcher on the Learning and Technology team at WestEd!
Congratulations Anna!
Kelsey Campbell was awarded the Outstanding Undergraduate Research Scholar Award from the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
This award recognizes outstanding undergraduate Psychology majors for their contribution to research in our department. We thank Kelsey for her outstanding work in our lab!
Congratulations Kelsey, and best of luck with your graduate studies!
Melissa Schoenlein received a 2022 Elsevier/Vision Research Travel Award to present her work at the Annual Meeting of the Vision Sciences Society.
Talk title: “Color category boundaries predict generalization of color-concept associations”
Congratulations Melissa!
Clementine Zimnicki was awarded a Kenzi Valentyn Vision Research Grant from the McPherson Eye Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Her project is on understanding factors that influence people’s interpretations of colormap data visualizations. Congrats Clementine!
Our paper “Context matters: A theory of semantic discriminability for perceptual encoding systems” received Honorable Mention for best paper at IEEE VIS 20211!
This paper presents semantic discriminability theory, a new theory on constraints for generating semantically discriminable perceptual features for encoding systems that map perceptual features to concepts. We provided evidence supporting two hypotheses that arise from the theory. First, the capacity to create semantically discriminable color palettes for a set of concepts depends on the difference in color-concept association distributions between those concepts, independent of properties of the concepts alone. Second, people can accurately interpret mappings between colors and concepts for concepts previously considered “non-colorable,” to the extent that the colors are semantically discriminable. Although we focused on color in this study, the theory has potential to extend to other types of visual features (e.g., shape, orientation, visual texture) and features in other perceptual modalities (e.g., sound, odor, touch).
Reference: Mukherjee, K., Yin, B., Sherman, B. E., Lessard, L. & Schloss, K. B. Context matters: A theory of semantic discriminability for perceptual encoding systems. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. PDF
Kushin Mukherjee was awarded a Kenzi Valentyn Vision Research Grant from the McPherson Eye Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
His project is on understanding how visual communication shapes the structure of visual concept representations. Congrats Kushin!
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!
Mukherjee, K., Yin, B., Sherman, B. E., Lessard, L. & Schloss, K. B. Context matters: A theory of semantic discriminability for perceptual encoding systems. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. PDF
Schloss, K. B., Schoenlein, M. A., Tredinnick, R., Smith, S. Miller, N. Racey, C. Castro, C. Rokers, B. (2021-online). The UW Virtual Brain Project: An immersive approach to teaching functional neuroanatomy. Translational Issues in Psychological Science. PDF
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 awards each year upon young scientists who have made excellent scientific contributions to the field of cognitive psychology early in their careers. The purpose of the Early Career Award (ECA) is to raise the visibility of our science by recognizing excellent young scientists within the field.
https://www.psychonomic.org/page/early_career_award
Graduate student Melissa Schoenlein received a 2020 OPAM Professional Development Award! Congrats Melissa!
