Recent research shows that deaf signers show increased behavioral and neural sensitivity to certain types of movement, such as biological motion, human actions, and signing avatars. However, other work suggests that in deaf signers exposed to signed language before age five, the mirror mechanism has minimal involvement during the perception of…

Our visual system samples external information, adjusts its sensitivity and constructs a stable representation of the world that allows us to perceive and interact with objects in our environments. Visual information with different levels of complexity is processed through the hierarchically organized visual cortical areas. This dissertation…

This work examines how a better understanding of visual perception and attention can impact visualization design. In a collection of studies, I explore how different levels of the visual system can measurably affect a variety of visualization metrics. The results show that expert preference, user performance, and even computational performance are…

The dissertation presents a theory of semantics and pragmatics for both language and vision. I focus on sentences including proper names, descriptions, and attitude report verbs, and on the Necker cube. I propose the Open Instruction Theory (OIT), according to which the linguistic meaning of a sentence and the semantic contribution of visual…