David E Irwin, Professor

Much of my past research has concentrated on a classic problem in perception: How do we perceive the visual world as unified, stable, and continuous despite the frequent disruptions caused by movements of the eyes? I have addressed this question by examining what people remember from a single glance at a scene, and by examining how people combine information across eye movements. More recently I have been investigating the effects of eye movements on cognitive processing; it turns out that eye movements actually interfere with some cognitive processes but not with others. I am also interested in interactions between perception and language, and in particular the question of how people talk about what they see.