Jeremy Wolfe

Date: 

Thursday, February 15, 2018, 12:00pm to 1:15pm

Location: 

Room 765 William James Hall

Jeremy M Wolfe, PhD
Professor of Ophthalmology & Radiology,
Harvard Medical School

Visual Attention Lab
Department of Surgery
Brigham & Women's Hospital

Title: I underestimated your capacity!

 

I will tell 1 (or maybe 2) stories in this talk. The story that I will certainly tell you is about Multiple Object Awareness (MOA). You probably know about Multiple Object Tracking (MOT). If I ask you to keep track of the locations of N out of M identical disks, wandering around on the screen, you can keep track of 3-4 of them. In Multiple Identity Tracking (MIT), all the items are unique (e.g. cartoon animals). They wander around the screen and, at some moment, they are all occluded. If I ask you, “Where is the bunny?”, I find that the typical MIT capacity is just 2-3. The same is true for Multiple Event Monitoring (MEM). Many tasks suggest that your ability to keep track of a dynamic world is extremely limited (see also change detection and related measures of working memory.) In this talk, I will argue that, if we are trying to understand how we function in a dynamic world, we are significantly underestimate capacity. The new Multiple Object Awareness task shows a capacity 2-4X that shown my MOT, MIT, MEM, etc. If I have a lot of time, I will then switch gears and tell you a bit about the “gist” of breast cancer. There is a signal of abnormality that experts can detect that may serve as a new “biomarker” for breast cancer risk. Unlike MOA, this is an ability that requires training; though, returning to MOA, one might wonder if training could improve your MOA capacity as well.