Zoe (Jing) Xu

As a doctoral student, I am working with Drs. Buetti and Lleras in the Vision Lab. 

My major research interest concerns human's visual perception, particularly visual search behavior. I study visual search both as the topic itself and as the paradigm to understand human visual perception in a broader sense. Studying visual search as the topic itself, I investigate the factors influencing people's visual search efficiency and accuracy, including the number of distractors in the visual scene, the similarity between the target and distractors, the composition of the distractors, etc. I also study how people’s visual search efficiency is related to other aspects of visual ability, such as visual working memory and visual object recognition ability.

Using visual search as a paradigm, I study how do people process complex visual stimuli - when people visually search for the target in a scene, how does target-distractor contrast signals along color, shape and texture feature dimensions combine and contribute to the overall contrast signals that enable people to distinguish the target from distractors. I am using a new prediction-based approach to study people's visual search behavior, which could serve as an alternative to the traditional null hypothesis significance testing methodology. I also study human’s color perception, testing relationships between physical distances in color space and psychological distances measured in visual search tasks.