The Visual Perception Lab, directed by Dr. Yelda Semizer at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, studies how people use visual information to perceive, decide, and act in complex environments. Our research combines behavioral experiments, eye-tracking, and computational modeling to investigate how the visual system operates under uncertainty and within the limits of human perception.
We ask questions such as: What information is available outside the center of gaze? How do people decide where to look next? What makes a visual environment difficult to search? How can training and technology help people perform more effectively despite the limitations of human vision?
To answer these questions, we use tightly controlled laboratory experiments alongside naturalistic tasks that capture the demands of real-world settings. We also develop computational models to characterize visual environments and predict performance in visually demanding domains, including medical image search.