Jessica N. Goetz, Ph.D.
Courtesy Research Scientist
Department of Psychology, University of Central Florida
The visual environment can be measured. I assign numbers to the visual properties (e.g., colors, summary statistics) and use them to make predictions about attention. What we learn can be used to improve performance on real tasks, and give other researchers tools to do the same.
Most of what we know about attention comes from displays far simpler than anything outside the laboratory. I work a step closer to the real thing: not the world itself, but real objects and real scenes. The theories mostly hold. Attention uses more of what the environment offers than simple displays suggest, and observers take up whatever information the task makes available. The goal is to explore how attention may work outside the laboratory.
The other half of the work starts from what we already know, and asks where that knowledge can improve how people perform. I treat behavior as an input rather than only a result, measuring and modeling it, then feeding it back into the method, the analysis, and the solution that comes out of them.
Recent
- May 2026 — Talk at Vision Sciences Society: processing of scene summary statistics is rapid and affects feature-based attention.
- 2025 — MATCH published in Behavior Research Methods.