Tuesday, October 15, 2024
12:10pm-1:30pm
MC331 (Boardroom)
5 King's College Road
Benjamin Wolfe, PhD
U of T Department of Psychology
The art of avoiding a moose to the face: a vision science perspective on driver behaviour
Please register at the following link to help us plan:
https://shulab.mie.utoronto.ca/events/psycheng_registration_2024sept17_shu
Abstract: What can vision science and cognitive psychology teach us about driving? Driving is fundamentally a visual and cognitive task, but when we hear about driving, we often hear about how dangerous distracted driving is, but not why it’s dangerous. We hear about how our cars might be able to drive for us, but not how we would still need to remain aware of our surroundings in the driver’s seat, or what the car would need to know about the driver. In this talk, I will discuss how studying driving from a vision science perspective lets us learn about how we acquire visual information from our environment and how this understanding is essential to the development of effective driving technologies now and self-driving technology in the future. First, I will present research showing what drivers can and can’t understand at a glance, and the implications of this work for autonomous vehicles. In the second half of my talk, I will discuss questions of attention and distraction, showcasing work on how distraction behind the wheel can take multiple forms and how we can bring classic questions in attentional cueing out of the lab. I’ll also discuss why drivers miss rare dangerous situations on the road and the need for cognitive and technological interventions, and how this recent work from my lab has lead to collaborations with U of T faculty members in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.
Biography: Dr. Benjamin Wolfe is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, where he joined the faculty in 2021 and where he is a Director of the Applied Perception and Psychophysics Lab. His work is funded by NSERC, SSHRC, the Connaught Fund and XSeed, and has been previously supported by Toyota Research. Prior to joining the faculty at UofT, he was a senior postdoctoral associate at MIT from 2015-2020, where he was a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (working with Ruth Rosenholtz), studying questions of peripheral vision and driving. Dr Wolfe received his PhD in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015, where he was supervised by Dr. David Whitney, and he received his BA in Psychology from Boston University in 2008.
Registration link (and location) available soon (no later than 1 week before talk) – Please register to help us better plan.