Stephen Killingsworth —

Stephen started graduate work in the lab in 2006. He has been involved in work under our NSF grant to study people's beliefs about computer and robotic systems. Specifically, he's looked at how people think these may represent ongoing human actions. Stephen's other work has looked at connections between perception and action, including how knowledge about an object's function affects visual perception and action production.

Alex Varakin

Alex joined the lab in the summer of 2001 at Kent State, and received his PhD in 2005. His work focused on visual working memory, change blindness, and inattentional blindness. His dissertation looked at the relationship between attention and visual working memory. He is now an assistant professor at Knox College.

Publications:

• Arrington, James G., Levin, Daniel T., and Varakin, D. Alexander (2006). Color onsets and offsets, and luminance changes can cause change blindness. Perception, 35(12), 1665-1678.
• Wayand, Joseph F., Levin, Daniel T., Varakin, A. (2005). Inattentional blindness for a noxious multimodal stimulus. American Journal of Psychology, 118(3), 339-352.
• Varakin, D.A., Levin, D.T., & Fidler, R. (2004). Unseen and unaware: Applications of recent research on failures of visual awareness for human-computer interface design. Human-Computer Interaction, 19(4), 389-422.
• Levin, D.T., & Varakin, D.A. (2003). No pause for a brief disruption: Failures to detect interruptions to ongoing events.

Bonnie Angelone

Bonnie was a grad student in the lab when we were at Kent State, and completed her PhD in 2003. Her research focuses on the phenomenon of change blindness. Her masters thesis explored the degree to which failure to compare existing representations can cause change blindness (Angelone, Levin, & Simons, 2003), and her dissertation explored the impact of dual-task distraction on incidental change detection. While in the lab, Bonnie also worked on research using psychophysical tasks to understand same-race and cross-race face perception.

Publications:

• Angelone, B.L., Levin, D.T., & Simons, D.J. (2003). The roles of representation and comparison failures in change blindness. Perception. 32, 947-962.
• Levin, D.T., & Angelone, B.L. (2002). Categorical perception of race. Perception, 31 , 567-578 .
• Levin, D.T., Simons, D.J., Angelone, B.L., & Chabris, C.F. (2002). Memory for centrally attended changing objects in an incidental real-world change detection paradigm. British Journal of Psychology , 93, 289-302.
• Levin, D.T., & Angelone, B. L. (2001). Visual search for a socially defined feature: What causes the search asymmetry favoring cross-race faces? Perception and Psychophysics , 63 , 423-435.

Melissa Beck

Melissa started in the lab in the fall of 1998, and completed her PhD in 2003. Her research focused on visual metacognition and change blindness. Melissa's thesis explored the degree to which people understand that mental effort is necessary to detect changes (Beck & Levin, 2003) and her more recent work has explored the degree to which people detect changes to "stable" or "unstable" properties more readily (Beck, Angelone, & Levin, 2004), an article that was selected for coverage in the APA monitor!! Other research explores the degree to which overwriting contributes to change blindness (Beck & Levin, 2002).

Publications:

• Levin, D.T., & Beck, M.R. (2004). Thinking about seeing: Spanning the difference between metacognitive failure and success. In D.T. Levin (Ed), Thinking and Seeing: Visual Metacognition in Adults and Children . Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
• Beck, M.R., & Levin, D.T. (2003). The role of representational volatility in recognizing pre- and postchange objects. Perception and Psychophysics, 65, 458-468.
• Beck, M. R., & Levin, D. T. (2003). The Guidance of Visual Attention: Using and Acquiring Knowledge about the Probability of Change [Abstract]. Journal of Vision, 3(9).
• Levin, D.T., Drivdahl, S.B., Momen, N., & Beck, M.R. (2002). False predictions about the detectability of unexpected visual changes: The role of beliefs about attention, memory, and the continuity of attended objects in causing change blindness blindness.

Joe Wayand

Joe received his PhD from Kent State in the summer of 2003, and currently holds an instructor position at Depauw University, but he just received and accepted an offer for a tenure track position in the Psychology department at the Loyola University in New Orleans. His research explores the relationship between vision and audition. In his dissertation, Joe explored inattention blindness for noxious multimodal stimuli. In these experiments, subjects attended to one event (a group of people passing a basketball) while another event unexpectedly occurred (someone walked into the scene and scraped their fingernails down a blackboard). Despite the salience of the event, about 50% of subjects were unaware of it.

Yukari Takarae

Yukari worked in the lab on several projects, so although her advisor at Kent was Larry Melamed (Yukari completed her PhD in the fall of 2002), we count her as a lab alum anyway. Yukari is interested in the neurological bases of autism and in visual processing of natural objects. While at Kent she worked on a project exploring the bases of category-specific visual agnosia (Takarae & Levin, 2001), and one in which we explored visual search for real world objects (Levin, Takarae, Miner, & Keil, 2001).

Publications:

• Takarae, Y., & Levin, D.T. (2001). Animals and artifacts may not be treated equally: Differentiating strong and weak forms of category specific visual agnosia. Brain and Cognition, 45 , 249-264.
• Levin, D.T., Takarae, Y., Miner, A., & Keil, F.C. (2001). Efficient visual search by category: Specifying the features that mark the difference between artifacts and animals in preattentive vision. Perception and Psychophysics , 63 , 676-697.