Tuesday, October 7, 2025
12:10pm-1:30pm
Sidney Smith Hall, SS 560A
100 St George St
Speaker: Dr. Anna Kosovicheva
Assistant Professor, University of Toronto, Department of Psychology
Location: SS560A (Sidney Smith Hall, 100 Saint George Street, Room 560A – in basement)
Title: Why we can’t see eye to eye: Individual differences in visual perception in the lab and beyond
To help us plan, please register at the below link:
Abstract:
Much of what we can learn about visual perception comes from studying averages, but we can all think of examples where people disagree about what they see. At what level do these differences emerge? Approaches to examining individual differences in visual perception often emphasize high-level processes like object recognition, but variation can arise early in visual processing and propagate to complex perceptual judgments. In the first part of this talk, I will examine how individual performance in fundamental visual tasks varies across spatial locations, using both in-lab studies and large-scale online datasets. In the second part of this talk, I will turn to real-world settings that can benefit from an individual differences approach to visual perception, from digital readability to performance on collaborative tasks, with an eye towards helping individual users.
Biography:
Dr. Anna Kosovicheva received her bachelor’s degree in psychology from UC Berkeley in 2009 and went on to do her PhD in Psychology at UC Berkeley in 2015, where she studied visual perception, examining how visual motion contributes to perception and action. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship from 2015 to 2020 at Northeastern University in Boston, where she developed laboratory-based vision assessments for patients with binocular visual impairments, under an NIH postdoctoral fellowship. Currently, Dr. Kosovicheva’s lab at the University of Toronto Mississauga uses a combination of behavioural methods, eye tracking, and patient research to explore individual differences in visual perception from both a fundamental and applied research perspective.
To help us plan, please register at the below link:
https://shulab.mie.utoronto.ca/events/psycheng-seminar-registration-2025-oct-07-dr-anna-kosovicheva