Looking for research into visual information processing by humans

There is a family of cognitive tasks, whose successful execution requires continuous information processing by the visual center in the human brain. Examples of such tasks are:

  • Lipreading.
  • Combat airplane pilot following the airplane’s status displays during dogfights.
  • Following arena status displays during land battles by army unit commander (Israelis would recognize this as those plasma displays, which got bad rap during 2nd Lebanon War due to commanders staying in safe place while their soldiers risk their lives).
  • Ticker and notices to stockholders in stock exchanges, which need to be followed by stock traders.

Existing research in visual recognition, of which I am aware, deals with shape recognition, when the person being tested needs to perform a shape recognition operation not more frequently than once each several seconds.

What I need to find is research dealing with optimization of the way visual information is presented, so that recognition operations and subsequent information processing can happen several times each second.

So I am looking for help in finding such research. To be able to help me, you probably need to be researcher in the area of cognitive psychology and be aware of existing research worldwide.

If you know about such research, please let me know!

Author: Omer Zak

I am deaf since birth. I played with big computers which eat punched cards and spew out printouts since age 12. Ever since they became available, I work and play with desktop size computers which eat keyboard keypresses and spew out display pixels. Among other things, I developed software which helped the deaf in Israel use the telephone network, by means of home computers equipped with modems. Several years later, I developed Hebrew localizations for some cellular phones, which helped the deaf in Israel utilize the cellular phone networks. I am interested in entrepreneurship, Science Fiction and making the world more accessible to people with disabilities.

3 thoughts on “Looking for research into visual information processing by humans”

  1. yes and no. For example, you could have 4 faces in parallel, each describing a different sliding window timescale, or whatever. Or have the eyes give you “rapid” timescale info and the ears “long time” averages.

    Anyway, it was just an initial point to start poking around.

    good luck.

  2. It is one possibility.
    The Chernoff face (or whatever visualization method being chosen) being displayed would need to vary the displayed features over time, and at as rapid pace as possible – yet continue to be readable by whomever is viewing it.

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