In this conversation, cognitive psychology professor Thérèse Collins shares her insights into the complex machinery of visual perception. She discusses how our eyes and brains work together in active, rather than passive, ways to shape our understanding of the world. Discover the nuances of eye movements, the impact of screen saturation on attention, and the relevance of eye-tracking technology in marketing. Thérèse also bridges philosophy and psychology, revealing the interdisciplinary nature of studying visual elements.
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question_answer ANECDOTE
Switching to Vision Study
Thérèse Collins switched from psycholinguistics to vision because language was too complex to understand fully.
She found vision simpler and more intellectually pleasing to study compared to language.
insights INSIGHT
Philosophy Helps Psychology Define
Psychologists ask questions that can be answered, unlike philosophers who ask important but abstract questions.
Cognitive psychology would greatly benefit from integrating philosophical input, especially in defining constructs.
insights INSIGHT
Differentiating Vision and Perception
Vision is a broader term including physical optics, while perception specifically refers to our internal experience of the visual world.
You can have vision without perception and perception without vision as distinct phenomena.
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Like many of our cognitive abilities, it is easy to take vision for granted. On a daily basis, vision seems rather simple: various objects, people, landscapes present themselves before us; and, if our eyes are open and function well, we are bestowed with a visual experience of these things. We then act on this experience in all the ways the world affords. In reality, things are much more complex than this naive experience might lead us to think. For instance, visual perception isn’t passive in the way just described. Rather, our sense organs and brain are constantly performing an enormous amount of intricate operations. Importantly, most of these operations are not directly controllable in any significant way. So, what is the nature of this impressive and somewhat autonomous machinery? Where does it start? What must our eyes do in order for us to perceive the world? How is what they do influenced by other psychological and biological factors? How is it even possible to study all of this? Today’s guest is the person to answer, if not all these questions, at least some of them.
She is Thérèse Collins. She is a professor of cognitive psychology at Université de Paris-Cité, where she is also the director of the vision team at the Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition center. She obtained her PhD in Psychology from Université Paris Descartes, post-which she did a post-doc in Hamburg, Germany. Broadly, her research group studies visual perception, eye movements and object representations.
Cognitations 
