Representation of Visual Information
Much of my research focuses on the representation of visual information. When people encounter a complex visual display, they do not have the working memory capacity to represent all of it in detail. The goal of this line of research is to understand how capacity limits as well as individual, contextual and sociocultural factors impact processing of visual information. This line of research has led to separate sets of studies investigating basic perceptual mechanisms (ensemble perception, serial dependency effects), processing of data visualizations and data-visualization based interventions augmenting everyday reasoning.
Interactions of Memory with Identity: Implications for Memory Models
In a separate line of research, we have been investigating how our representations of public events,
past and future, are also shaped by cohort and sociopolitical factors. Our goal is to move beyond
merely descriptive approaches to collective mental time travel and identify mechanisms.