COGNITIVE PROCESSING IN VISUAL SEARCH: The effect of ageing and dynamic environments

Imagine exploring a new urban environment. How does your mobility affect your ability to detect cars on the street, or navigate among pedestrians?

Processing relevant information from the surrounding environment is affected by diverse factors such as the lighting conditions, clutter of the street, or one´s personal skills based on age.

This research investigates humans´ cognitive processing of visual information as it naturally occurs in everyday activities e.g., wayfinding, driving, and exploration.

We analyze multimodal visual search, encompassing gaze, body movements, and brain activity in order to explore humans´ advanced abilities to adapt and cope with complex situations.

Using virtual reality, we replicate everyday activities in which people actively search for targets in their surroundings based on the paradigm of visual foraging.

Particularly we investigate (a) the effect of self-movement on search performance, (b) the role of environmental complexity, and (c) the effect of ageing.

This interdisciplinary project combines methods from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and virtual reality technologies to explore human visual search in naturalistic continuous tasks.

Research outcomes will be instrumental in the design of personalised cognitive rehabilitation and training of older adults.

Based and hosted in Sweden, this research will be performed in close collaboration with foreign labs in Iceland and France.