News

Michael Hout, Outstanding Workshop Award. (NMSU photo Josh Bachman)
  • May 9th, 2023: Meet our newest graduate students, joining us in the fall. Ashley Mathis (left) is coming to us from University of Arkansas (at Little Rock) and plans to study things like attention, perception, and memory. Sydney Schabacker (right) is joining us from California State University (San Marcos) and will be studying categorization, categorical visual search, and object memory. Welcome to the lab, Ashley and Sydney!
  • May 4th, 2023: We have yet another person joining our lab. Ms. Paean Luby will be joining us as a visiting researcher and computer programmer starting in the summer of 2023. Paean comes to us from the University of Richmond, where she works in the lab of Dr. Arryn Robbins (the first PhD student to graduate from this lab!). Paean (and Arryn) will be helping to bring to life a variety of projects we’re planning to do in virtual reality. Welcome to the group, Paean!
  • April 24th, 2023: Our newest addition to the lab is Janelle Hernandez. Janelle has been a research assistant in our lab this semester, but has decided to upgrade and become a Discovery Scholar. In her project, she’ll be helping to run our NM-INBRE funded research on medical image perception, and will be working closely with another DSP student, Emily Stutesman, on this work. The pair hope to present some of our results at upcoming conferences in the fall. Welcome, Janelle!
  • April 19th, 2023: I’m very pleased to announce that my promotion to the rank of Professor has just been approved!
  • January 10th, 2023: Emily Stutesman, a veteran member of our lab, has just joined us as a Discovery Scholar. She is going to be working on research in medical image perception; specifically, strategy training and perceptual learning paradigms to help improve anomaly detection. Welcome, Emily!
  • November 5th, 2022: Next week (11/10/22) I’ll be giving an invited lecture to the Northern New Mexico College Biomedical Seminar Series. I’ll be discussing our recent work on attentional control strategies and perceptual learning approaches to improving medical image perception.
  • November 2nd and 4th, 2022: This week, I presented an information session and workshop at the NMSU Teaching Academy geared towards making the National Science Foundation a bit less intimidating and obscure to newcomers. My plan is to do an even more detailed workshop in the Spring of 2023. Stay tuned.
  • October 20th, 2022: This week, our lab participated in the 2022 NMSU “Research and Creativity Open House.” Special thanks to Bryan and Eben for helping us show some really talented and ambitious undergraduates (from the Honors College) what goes on in our lab, and how to get involved in Psychological Science research!
  • October 18th, 2022: Marko Hernandez has just joined our lab as the newest Discovery Scholar. He is going to be working on projects related to threat perception and conditions of low-prevalence. Welcome, Marko!
  • August 4th, 2022: I’m very proud to announce that — now that my rotation at the National Science Foundation is over — I’ve been asked to rejoin the editorial board at AP&P. I’ve started a new rotation at the journal, so send us your best work, fellow scientists!
  • July 26, 2022: I recently traveled to Santa Fe, NM to attend the NM-INBRE (Ideas Network of Biomedical Research Excellent) conference where I presented our work on simulated medical image perception.
  • March 30th, 2022: Our newest database, “The Oddity Detection in Diverse Scenes (ODDS) Database” has just been published at Behavior Research Methods. This work is a rated and validated database of real-world scenes, each of which has been modified multiple times to contain an anomaly (i.e., a blurred/rippled portion of the scene). The database contains hundreds of scenes (and more than 4,000 scene variants!) that should be of use to researchers interested in medical image perception or camouflage detection. We’re thrilled to see this in print at such an excellent journal. Congrats to our many collaborators on this project: Megan Papesh, Saleem Masadeh, Hailey Sandin, Stephen Walenchok, Phil Post, Jessica Madrid, Bryan White, Juan Guevara Pinto, Julian Welsh, Becca Skulsky, and Mariana Cazares Rodriguez. Thanks as well to Electronic Caregiver and the NM-INBRE program for funding this work.
  • November 3rd, 2021: Tomorrow, I will present a poster of our newest database at the 2021 Psychonomics Society meeting. This work is a rated and validated database of real-world scenes, each of which has been modified multiple times to contain an anomaly (i.e., a blurred/rippled portion of the scene). The database contains hundreds of scenes (and more than 4,000 scene variants!) that should be of use to researchers interested in medical image perception or camouflage detection. Come see what we’ve been up to! Thanks to my many collaborators on this project: Saleem Masadeh, Hailey Sandin, Megan Papesh, Phil Post, Jessica Madrid, Bryan White, Juan Guevara Pinto, Julian Welsh, Becca Skulsky, and Mariana Cazares Rodriguez. Thanks as well to Electronic Caregiver and the NM-INBRE program for funding this work.
  • November 3rd, 2021: Today I’ll be joining a career panel for the Object Perception, Attention, and Memory conference. It’ll be nice to chat with the OPAM community about careers in academia and the federal government, and I’m excited to be returning to the meeting again after having been a co-organizer way back in 2013 and 2014.
  • September 7th, 2021: Today, Hayward Godwin presented our overview talk “Human Visual Cognition and Decision Making” to the VizTIG 2021 Symposium at the Alan Turing Institute (virtually).
  • August 22nd, 2021: This past weekend I volunteered for the National Science Foundation‘s “Ask a Scientist” booth at the Washington DC Awesome-Con. Had a great time answering questions from curious people and trying to get some kids interested in cognition and the brain!
  • August 17th, 2021: Bryan White has just successfully passed his comprehensive exams. Congrats, Bryan!
  • July 7th, 2021: Becca Skulsky completed her master’s thesis today, having presented her work on templates for rejection with complex visual objects. She’s now about to begin a job in industry back on the east coast. Congrats, Becca!
  • June 25th, 2021: I’m happy to announce that we officially have two new people joining our lab. Dr. Megan Papesh — my long time collaborator and friend — is joining the lab as a co-Director to help oversee all of our research and mentorship. And Eben Daggett will be joining our lab as a graduate student working on computational models of attention, search, and eye movements. Welcome, Megan and Eben!
  • May 20th, 2021: Today I had the great pleasure of speaking with the psychology and neuroscience folks at University of California, Davis. I gave a talk on the use of multi-dimensional scaling to model similarity in empirical studies. Not as much fun as traveling to California and speaking with folks in person, I admit. But it was still a very good experience with an even better audience of grads and faculty.
  • December 21st, 2020: Our new poster for the Experimental Psychology Society meeting (in London, UK) is now ready for virtual presentation. Andras Zsidó presents our poster — “The effects of task-irrelevant threatening stimuli on orienting- and executive attentional processes under cognitive load” — in collaboration with Diana Stecina, Rebecca Cseh, and myself. Check it out, below!
  • October 29th, 2020: Jessica Madrid has just completed her poster for the virtual Psychonomics conference this year on our work in multi-modal search for Lego (in collaboration with Bryan White, Collin Scarince, and Hayward Godwin). Because this year is an entirely virtual conference, Jessica has created a short video walk through of our work, which you can view below.
  • June 2nd, 2020: Now that it’s 100% official, I’m happy to announce that I’m headed to work at the National Science Foundation starting next Monday. I’ll be a Program Director in the Perception, Action, and Cognition Program of the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences. I’m certainly sad to be leaving the NM/Texas area for a while, but will still be maintaining my labs and mentorship (albeit remotely) for the 2 years I’m at the NSF in the DC area (after which I will return to NMSU full time). I’m incredibly excited and a little nervous to get started, but it should be an awesome opportunity. I had planned at this point to post a “here we come DC” post, but due to covid, I’ll be working remotely from El Paso for at least a couple months (until the NSF building opens back up). So for now, you’re stuck with me, El Paso.
  • May 11th, 2020: We (myself and Dr. Phil Post) have just been awarded a Developmental Research Project Program grant from the New Mexico IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence. Our project is entitled “Strategy training in search: Evidence from eye movements and virtual reality.” We are thrilled to put this money to use to fund research in the Addison Care Virtual and Augmented Reality Laboratory (which we both co-direct). In the project, we’ll explore cognitive strategy use in a longitudinal study focused on simulated radiological screening and simulated search and rescue. We’re thrilled to get to work, and are extremely grateful to NM-INBRE for this opportunity!
  • April 20th, 2020: Edin Sabic successfully defended his PhD today, and became the third doctoral graduate from our lab. His work was titled “Eye movements and machine learning: Predicting user search templates.” While it was not ideal to have a defense done over Zoom, he nonetheless did a great job, and passed with flying colors!
  • January 25th, 2020: Today, our VR lab (the Addison Care Virtual and Augmented Reality Laboratory) did some community outreach with Ciudad Nueva, from El Paso. A wonderful group of young persons joined us to learn about virtual and augmented reality, to chat with us, and to try out the equipment. We had a great time and hope they come back and visit us again soon!
  • January 15th, 2020: Congratulations to Rebecca Penn! Today she defended the massive undertaking that was her master’s thesis on visual search in the real world (specifically, in settings designed to mimic “clue finding” tasks undertaken by search and rescue responders). Well done, Master Rebecca.
  • December 19th, 2019: We have a pair of new Discovery Scholars Program recruits that have recently joined the lab. Mariana Cazares Rodriguez will be working on creating an open access database of real world visual search scenarios. And Jonathan Ayavar is working on some virtual reality search and rescue programming. Welcome, both!
  • December 18th, 2019: We just had a new paper come out in the Journal of Sports Sciences. This one (headed by Chris Aiken, and including Phil Post, myself, and Jeff Fairbrother) investigates self-controlled practice in a motor learning task. Find it here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02640414.2019.1704498
  • December 18th, 2019: Recently, our newest paper came out in Behavior Research Methods. This paper (headed by Justin MacDonald, and including myself and Joseph Schmidt) is an algorithm used to deal with incomplete block designs in psychology and elsewhere. It is particularly useful for those of you who want to use the spatial arrangement method of collecting similarity data on large stimulus sets. Check it out, here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-019-01326-x
  • November 11th, 2019: Part of Arryn Robbins‘ dissertation work was just published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. Our new paper, “Scene priming provides clues about target appearance that improve attentional guidance during categorical search” can be found here: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fxhp0000707. Congrats, Arryn!
Dr. Phillip Post, left, and Dr. Michael Hout, right, speaking at the opening of the Addison Care Virtual Reality/ Augmented Reality Laboratory in Milton Hall. October 2, 2019. (NMSU photo by Josh Bachman)
Dan Arvizu, New Mexico State University Chancellor, testing out one of the Virtual Reality work stations with the help of Saleem Masadeh, Phd student in the Computer Science department, during the opening of the Addison Care Virtual Reality/ Augmented Reality Laboratory in Milton Hall. October 2, 2019. (NMSU photo by Josh Bachman)
  • September 3rd, 2019: We just had a pair of posters accepted for this year’s Object Perception, Attention, and Memory conference in Montreal, Canada. First, we have Jessica Madrid out front on our poster called “Open the window: Passive search strategies lead to broader attentional distribution during single target and hybrid visual search.” Second, Bryan White will present a poster (in collaboration with Hayward Godwin, Jessica Madrid, Collin Scarince, and myself) called “Every search is awesome!: A pilot study using Lego to examine three-dimensional visual search.” Congrats, Jessica and Bryan!
  • July 25th, 2019: Just got one more poster accepted to the 60th Annual Psychonomics Society meeting in Montreal. Juan Guevara-Pinto will present our poster (in collaboration with Megan Papesh and myself) called “The details are in the difficulty: Incidental recognition of objects’ perceptual details following visual search.” Congrats, Megan and Juan!
  • July 24th, 2019: We’ve just had a pair of posters accepted to the 60th Annual Psychonomics Society meeting this November in Montreal, Canada. Both projects are in collaboration with Russell Richie and Sudeep Bhatia of the University of Pennyslvania and Bryan White (in my lab). Russell will present our poster titled “Modeling fine-grained word similarity with embeddings from language corpora, free association, and feature norms” and I’ll present a poster called “The spatial arrangement method of collecting similarity ratings can capture higher dimensional, conceptual similarity structures.” Congratulations, guys!
  • July 17th, 2019: Last week, I gave a pair of talks in Australia, at Macquarie University and the University of Wollongong. I gave talked titled, “The detail is in the difficulty: Challenging search facilitates incidental encoding of objects’ perceptual details” in collaboration with my co-authors, Juan Guevara-Pinto and Megan Papesh. I had a great time visiting these amazing universities, and can’t wait for the opportunity to visit again!
  • July 8th, 2019: Next week, Hayward Godwin will be presenting some new research we’ve done on the “abacus task” and people’s insight into their own eye movement behavior. He’ll be presenting a talk (co-authored by Andreea Butnaru and myself) at the Experimental Psychology Society meeting in Bournemouth (UK), titled “Using the abacus task to study overestimation of accuracy in eye movements.”
  • July 2nd, 2019: Our newest article is out in Frontiers for Young Minds. This one is written by Arryn Robbins and I on the topic of the involvement of the brain during visual search. You can read it online, here: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2019.00089
  • May 15th, 2019: We have a new article out now in Frontiers for Young Minds on the use of transcranial direct current stimulation. This one is headed by Mary Berg and Audrey Morrow, and is titled “Wake up, Brain!: Using electricity to think and feel differently.” You can read it online, here:
    https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2019.00062
  • April 24th, 2019: Last week, I gave an invited lecture (at the invitation of the Centre for Vision and Cognition) at the University of Southampton (in England). I was quite excited to go back to Southampton, and to give a talk on our recent work in hybrid visual memory search and eye movements called “Examining passive and active search strategies during hybrid visual memory search: Evidence from eye movements.“ Thanks to my collaborator, Jessica Madrid, whose thesis work formed the basis of this talk!
  • February 19th, 2019: I’ve just been selected as the NMSU College of Arts and Sciences “Department Star“ for the Psychology Department. I’m very honored to receive this recognition, and look forward to the reception event on April 5th!
  • February 18th, 2019: A pair of Discovery Scholars students just joined our team. Hop on over to the homepage to learn more about Victoria Arvizu and Rene Mcpherson!
  • February 18th, 2019: We’ve just had a talk accepted to this year’s Midwestern Psychological Association conference in Chicago. Arryn Robbins will present our paper, titled “Scene context facilitates search for heterogeneous categories.”  Congrats, Arryn!
  • February 13th, 2019: We’ve just had a poster accepted to this year’s Association for Psychological Science meeting in Washington DC (in May). Arryn Robbins will present a poster on our upcoming database, “The Pictures by Category and Similarity (PICS) Database: A database of 1200 pictures from 20 object categories rated for similarity using multidimensional scaling.” Congrats to co-authors, Justin MacDonald, Ashley Ercolino, Joe Schmidt, and Edin Sabic!
  • February 11th, 2019: Our newest Discovery Scholar to join the lab is Sydney Luna, who will also be contributing to our search and rescue “clue finding” projects. Check out the homepage for more info on Sydney!
  • February 6th, 2019: We have yet another Discovery Scholar joining the lab. Christine Dellefield-Lopez will be joining us to work on some research pertaining to search and rescue “clue finding.” Check out the homepage for info on Christine!
  • February 6th, 2019: We have another person joining our team. Kitt Phi will be joining the lab, both as a Discovery Scholars researcher and as a paid work-study programmer for our work in the upcoming Addison Care Virtual and Augmented Reality Laboratory (for which Phil Post and I are co-directors). Hop over to the homepage to learn more about Kitt!
  • February 6th, 2019: Congrats to Alexis Torres for publishing her first ever article in Frontiers for Young Minds, entitled “Pupils: A window into the mind.” You can access the article here: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2019.00003?fbclid=IwAR2Lj4etoDl5_a6WKrSNzHfbArv9HrTGT_YFEv67wDF31orpUEQYqAS-RQo
  • November 5th, 2018: Congratulations to Jessica Madrid for successfully passing her comprehensive exams! Now on to the PhD.
  • October 30th, 2018: Audrey Morrow traveled to Albuquerque, NM to present our research at the New Mexico Academy of Science Research Symposium. She presented our poster, entitled, “The effect of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on audition”. Our collaborators for this project were Amie Amiotte and Justin MacDonald.
  • October 16th, 2018: Congratulations to Edin Sabic for passing his comprehensive exams! Next up, dissertation.
  • September 20th, 2018: We’ve just gotten word that our posters were accepted to the 2018 Object Perception, Attention, and Memory conference in New Orleans, Louisiana.  This is particularly exciting because our posters span both graduate (Jessica Madrid, Rebecca Penn, and Bryan White) and undergraduate (Alexis Torres) members of our lab.  Jessica will present a poster entitled “It’s all a blur: Partial visual information triggers logarithmic decision making during object recognition.”  Rebecca will present a poster called “Getting a clue: Visual search in open terrain environments.”  Congrats, all!
  • July 20th, 2018: We’ve just had a pair of posters accepted to the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society in New Orleans.  Jessica Madrid will present our work on strategy use during search in a poster titled “Looking for the one: Passive strategies improve guidance and object recognition in single-target search.”  And Collin Scarince will present our modelling work in a poster titled “An update to the Guided Search model using multi-dimensional scaling to capture the features of complex, real-world objects.”  Congrats, all!
  • July 9th, 2018: I’m thrilled to announce that we have a second PhD student to graduate from our lab this year: Dr. Collin Scarince.  Collin successfully defended his dissertation today, titled, “Generalized Guided Search: A computational model of visual search powered by multidimensional scaling.”  We’re proud of Collin, and excited for what’s next in his career.
  • June 14th, 2018: I’m very pleased to announce that the first PhD student to graduate from our lab, Dr. Arryn Robbins, will soon be a post-doctoral researcher.  She has accepted a position at Carthage College, working with Dr. Anthony Barnhart and Dr. Leslie Cameron.  I’m thrilled that she’s on her way to such a great position, and am confident she’ll do great things at Carthage.
  • May 24th: 2018: I’ve been invited to be a funded presenter at the 4th Symposium on Visual Search and Selective Attention in Munich, Germany (http://mvss.org/).  This is a very prestigious honor for me, as I’ll be speaking alongside an incredibly well-respected and impressive group of academics who all share my research interests.  In July, I’ll present the work Jessica Madrid and I have been working on, titled “Passive search strategies improve attentional guidance and object recognition during demanding visual search.”  I can’t wait.
  • May 24th, 2018: I’ve recently been invited (by the Environmental Neuroscience Laboratory: http://enl.uchicago.edu/) to speak at the University of Chicago.  I’m very excited to travel to Chicago to speak with this excellent group of academics about our recent work on strategy use in visual search.
  • April 26th, 2018: I just received my official letter stating that I’ve been granted promotion and tenure.  As of August 2018, I will be a tenured Associate Professor.  I’m very excited to have this milestone behind me, and appreciate all the support I’ve had at NMSU to get me here.
  • April 23rd, 2018: This Friday (4/27/2018), Emily Green (an honors thesis student working in our lab) will present our research incidental memory work at the Undergraduate Research and Creative Arts Symposium (URCAS) here on campus.  If you’re around on Friday, swing by and see her present!  The title of the poster is “Challenging visual search creates better incidental memories for objects and their perceptual features.”  Good luck, Emily!
  • April 5th, 2018: I’m very pleased to announce that the first PhD to come out of our lab is the wonderful Dr. Arryn Robbins.  Arryn successfully defended her dissertation, “The role of context and exemplar variability in shaping the categorical search template.”  We’re all quite proud of her, but will be sad to see her go!
  • March 20th, 2018: I’ve just gotten word that I will be a panelist at the 2018 NMSU Assessment Conference (Writing to Think).  I will be part of a presentation titled, “Writing to learn? It’s not just for writing courses!”  Come check out the conference, and learn about ways to improve the writing components of your courses. 
  • March 13th, 2018: We’ve just had a new paper accepted to the open access journal Sage Open.  Our paper is titled “Simulating the fidelity of data for large stimulus set sizes and variable dimension estimation in multidimensional scaling.”  Congrats to my co-authors, Corbin Cunningham, Arryn Robbins, and Justin MacDonald!
  • February 13th, 2018: At this year’s Rocky Mountain Psychological Association meeting in Denver, CO, we’ll have a trio of talks to present.  In collaboration with Emily Green, Juan Guevara Pinto, and Dr. Megan Papesh, I’ll be giving a talk called “Challenging visual search creates better incidental memories for objects and their features.”  Arryn Robbins will be giving our talk called “Scene context can facilitate search for imprecisely specified targets.”  And John Kulpa will present our talk “Evaluating SpAM and multi-trial spatial arrangement methods of estimating subjective similarity” in collaboration with myself and Dr. Dom Simon.  Congrats, collaborators!
  • February 12th, 2018: This year, we’ll be presenting a poster for the first time at the Annual Convention of the Association for Psychological Science.  John Kulpa will be presenting our poster, titled, “Evaluating SpAM and multi-trial spatial arrangement methods of estimating subjective similarity.”  Congrats to John and our co-author, Dr. Dom Simon!
  • February 10th, 2018: We’ve just had a poster accepted to this year’s Vision Sciences Society meeting in Florida.  Arryn Robbins will be presenting our poster, titled “Scene context influences expectations about imprecisely specified search targets.”  Congrats, Arryn!
  • January 8th, 2018: I’m happy to say that I’ve started consulting for Major League Baseball, as part of their Umpire Training Program.  Over the next year, I will consult with the MLB regarding a variety of training programs aimed at increasing the perceptual skills of MLB umpires.
  • December 29th, 2017: I’m very pleased and proud to announce that I’ve been selected by the Association for Psychological Science as a 2017 Rising Star.  This award is for early career scientists, and I’m quite honored to have received it!  http://www.psychologicalscience.org/redesign/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/2017-Rising-Stars.pdf