Visual Attention Lab

Lab Members |Lab Photos

Wolfe Lab 2024

The current Wolfe Lab
(Left to right) Mr. Penguin, Jan, Suave Sloth, Ava, Jeremy holding a real puppydog (pls don't ask too many questions), Oryah holding an angry rat (also real), Jeunghwan with a.. bug..(??), Sharkie holding Nathan, Injae with the cutest stuffed animal in the lab.

Principal Investigator

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  Jeremy Wolfe

  

  Jeremy Wolfe is the head of the lab. He is Professor of Ophthalmology and of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. Wolfe received an AB in Psychology in 1977 from Princeton and his PhD in Psychology in 1981 from MIT under the supervision of Richard Held. His research focuses on visual search and visual attention with a particular interest in socially important search tasks in areas such as medical image perception (e.g. cancer screening), security (e.g. baggage screening), and intelligence. He taught Intro. Psychology and other courses for 25 years, mostly at MIT. Wolfe is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of AAAS, APA (Div 1, 3, & 6), and APS. He has been President of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS), President of the Eastern Psychological Association, Chair of the Board of the Psychonomic Society and a member of the Board of the Vision Sciences Society. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications (CRPI) and was Editor of Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. Wolfe also serves on the North American Board of the Union for Reform Judaism. He is married to Julie Sandell; Provost of Suffolk University in Boston (Information accurate in March, 2022). They have three sons: Ben, Philip, and Simon. Wolfe’s office contains more stuffed animals than one would expect in the office of a grown man.
  
  Click HERE for Dr. Wolfe's CV (2022).
  Email Dr. Wolfe

Research Fellows

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  Injae Hong

  Injae received her Ph.D at Yonsei University, Korea, where she worked with Min-Shik Kim on spatial attentional learning. Before then, she worked as a postmaster’s researcher at Korea Brain Research Institute with Su Keun Jeong. As a postdoctoral fellow, she is interested in how human's visual system efficiently (or inefficiently) works to handle abundant information from the world and affects human behavior. While Injae is not in the office, she inspires herself with the cognitive network by building yarn networks with crochet. Click here to see what's inside her brain. Fun Fact: Find her name on neurotree.org and you will see interesting fact about Injae's family tree. Injae’s three academic fathers, Jeremy, Min-Shik, and Su Keun, are all in a tangle: Jeremy is the grand-parent of Min-Shik and Su Keun is a child of Min-Shik. So, is Injae Jeremy’s academic child or grand-grand child???

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  Jeunghwan Choi

  Jeunghwan is a PhD student at Yonsei University, Korea, working under the supervision of Dr. Sang Chul Chong. His research focuses on ensemble perception and contextual cueing using various methods such as computer modeling and eye-tracking. Outside of the lab, Jeunghwan enjoys staying active through various physical activities and exercise to give some free time to his brain.

Research Assistants

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  Ava Mitra

  Originally from Chittagong, Bangladesh, Ava received her B.S. in Neuroscience from Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. While at Rhodes, she worked in Dr. Jason Haberman's Visual Cognition lab, studying the visual phenomena of ensemble perception. Her research looked at the hierarchical nature of ensemble coding, assessing how memory representations of ensembles change with information decay.

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  Nathan Trinkl

  Nathan has been playing the piano for 15 years!

  Nathan received a B.S. in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology and a B.A. in Piano Performance at Emory University. He previously worked with Dr. Daniel Dilks, studying how visual scene regions allow us to both recognize and navigate our environment. Specifically, his research focused on how the extension of information beyond the visual field may serve as a diagnostic feature of scenes.

Visiting Professors

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  Jan Philipp Röer

  In the Visual Attention Lab, Jan is something of an auditory oddball. He's interested in what makes a sound attract our attention and the mechanisms we have in place to prevent irrelevant sound from doing so (habituation, statistical learning, cognitive control). When Jan is not in Boston looking at auditory distraction during visual search with Jeremy, he works as a Professor of Experimental Psychology at Witten/Herdecke University. Jan's favorite sound is the rustling of autumn leaves.

Visiting Post-Docs

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  Oryah Lancry

  Oryah earned her Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she collaborated with Professor Yoni Pertzov to investigate memory-guided gaze behavior. As a postdoctoral researcher in the Visual Attention Lab, she is dedicated to employing eye-tracking techniques to unravel the underlying mechanisms behind "looked-but-failed-to-see" errors. Specifically, she aims to understand why observers may miss things that are right in front of their eyes.

Lab Alumni

Former Principal Investigators

Todd Horowitz

Former Post-Doctoral Research Fellows

Delgermaa Demchig
'22-'23

Daniel Ernst
'20-'21

Iris Wiegand
'17-'18

Yung-Hao Yang
'17-'18

Krista Ehinger
'13-'16

Preeti Sareen
'13-'15

Matthew S. Cain
'13-'14

Maria Nordfang
'13-'14

Trafton Drew
'11-'14

Melissa Le-Hoa Võ
'10-'14

Michelle Greene
'09-'11

Karla Evans
'08-'13

Yair Pinto
'08-'10

Ester Reijnen
'08-'09

Piers Howe
'07-'10

Anina Rich
'05-'07

David Fencsik
'03-'07

Evan Palmer
'03-'07

Melina Kunar
'03-'06

Aude Oliva
'00-'02

Nayantara Santhi
'00-'02

Former Visiting Graduate Students

Former Visiting Professors

Former Visiting Post-Docs

Matthew B. Thompson
'14

Michael Zehetleitner
'09

Former Research Assistants

Former Visiting Undergraduate, and High School Students