Vision serves many important purposes, but none more important than guiding the things we do. Vision informs the movements of our hands, limbs and eyes as we manipulate and interact with the objects around us.
William James understood this very well when he proposed that the entire machinery of the nervous system had just one goal: "To take information from the environment and generate behavior best suited to that information." (Principles of Psychology, 1890)
To generate that best-suited behavior, the human brain performs complex computations on information provided by the eyes. That information is crucial for appropriate actions, but it alone is not enough. The eye and brain must also exploit memories of what we saw previously, as well as expectations of what we will most likely encounter in the future.
lab activitiesThe Visual Cognition Laboratory in Brandeis' Volen Center for Complex Systems treats human vision as a neural process that plays a key role in many important cognitive functions.

Lab members currently work on:

  • how we remember, forget, or mis-remember what we see
    (click to see demonstrations of our visual memory tests)
  • visual memory and perception in aging
  • perception of motion, particularly auditory and cognitive influences on visual motion
    (click to see demonstrations of these effects)
  • visual and memory-guided wayfinding and social interactions in virtual and real environments
  • EEG/ERP studies of the neural circuits in cognitive control of visual memory
  • how we are able to imitate actions and gestures that we see
  • how remember what we hear. The experiments use moving ripple sounds, complex, auditory analogues to stimuli in our visual memory experiments. Click for sample stimuli.
The laboratory's research is supported principally by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
For information about any of these projects, vision@brandeis.edu