(Philip Lelyveld comment: stereographers and cinematographers might be interested to know that this type of conference exists.)

April 7-8, 2011, University of Nebraska, Lincoln campus.

The University of Nebraska Lincoln is pleased to announce our annual

symposium which will take place April 7-8, 2011 at the UNL City Campus

Union in Lincoln, Nebraska.  This year the topic is focused on visual

search. This Symposium will bring together distinguished speakers who are

conducting cutting edge research on the many factors that influence search

behavior. These factors will include low-level feature detection;

statistical learning; scene perception; neural mechanisms of attention;

and applied research in real world settings.

The speakers will be:

Andrew Hollingworth, Ph.D. (University of Iowa): Interactions

between visual memory and saccade target selection during search

Raymond Klein, Ph.D. (Dalhousie University) : Searching in space

and time

Steve Mitroff, Ph.D. (Duke University): Examining influences on

applied visual search performance

Jan Theeuwes, Ph.D. (Vrije University): Automatic control of visual

attention

Nick Turk-Browne, Ph.D. (Princeton University): Statistical

learning and it’s consequences

Jeremy Wolfe, Ph.D. (Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s

Hospital): What’s my motivation in this scene? Visual search when it

really counts

Steven Yantis, Ph.D. (Johns Hopkins University): Reward and

attentional control in visual search

The Symposium will include a poster session and will be followed by a

published volume.  For information on registering for the symposium,

submitting a poster (due date: March 15) and more, please visit

http://www.unl.edu/psypage/symposium/index.shtml

Please contact the symposium co-organizers, Mike Dodd (mdodd2@unl.edu) or John

Flowers (jflowers1@unl.edu) if you have any questions or require

additional information.  We hope to see you in Lincoln in April!

—–

To successfully navigate and interact with our visual world, one must efficiently direct attention to important features in the environment while simultaneously ignoring unimportant or distracting stimuli. As a consequence, one of the most studied aspects of cognition is visual search. Everyone can relate to the example of searching for one’s car in a parking lot or a friend in a crowd, but the importance of search actually extends beyond these examples to even the most basic behaviors. Watching television, reading, and walking down a city street all require continuous shifts of attention throughout the environment to extract meaningful target information. In a sense then, almost everything we do in life is a form of search task.

Given the importance of the search process to everyday behavior, countless studies have been conducted to determine the behavioral, cognitive, and neurological factors that influence how we attend to our surroundings. What has emerged is a complex picture in which this seemingly simple process is influenced by both bottom-up (e.g. features, luminance) and top-down (e.g. motivation, expertise) factors of which an individual may or may not be consciously aware. As a consequence, a complete understanding of search can only be obtained by considering the research from a number of different paradigms and domains. This Symposium will bring together distinguished speakers who are conducting cutting edge research on the many factors that influence search behavior. These factors will include low-level feature detection; statistical learning; scene perception; neural mechanisms of attention; and applied research in real world settings.

See the original post here: http://www.unl.edu/psypage/symposium/index.shtml