About Us

Applied Perception & Psychophysics LaboratorY (APPLY) Group

Our research group is in the Psychology Department at the University of Toronto Mississauga. We study visual perception and its application to real-world problems. The group is run by Dr. Benjamin Wolfe and Dr. Anna Kosovicheva, housing their specific research laboratories, and takes a use-inspired approach to vision science and cognitive psychology research, looking to the world for problems that can benefit from a vision science approach and that can, in turn, tell us about how visual perception works.

Wolfe Lab

The Wolfe Lab studies how we acquire visual information in real-world situations, mostly using driving as a tool to better understand visual perception, attention and behaviour, and the lab collaborates with researchers in U of T's Mechanical and Industrial Engineering program on much of this work.
driver holding a smartphone and a steering wheel

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Kosovicheva Lab

The Kosovicheva Lab studies individual differences in fundamental visual processes and the implications they have for perception in the real-world. Many real-world settings can benefit from an individual differences approach, including digital readability, collaborative tasks, and assessment of visual impairments.
people in a train station

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Social Media Updates & Lab News

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APPLY LAB (@applylabutm) • Instagram photos and videos

December 6, 2024

Congratulations to Dr. Wolfe for securing funding from the Enhanced Road Safety Transfer Payment Program (ERSTPP) by Transport Canada! This funding will go towards a project titled A Foundation for Next-Generation Driver Distraction Detection and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems which plans to examine how distractions cause people to miss road hazards using eye tracking! This project is in collaboration with Dr. Birsen Donmez’s Human Factors and Applied Statistics Lab at UofT’s Mechanical and Industrial Engineering department.

May 18, 2024

See our lab's posters from the Vision Sciences Society meeting this year:

  • The effects of variable fonts on sentence-level reading
  • Did you look at the moose? Driver gaze behaviour while searching for hazards in dynamic road scenes
  • Follow the Dot: Do we have implicit awareness of our own eye movements?
  • August 31, 2023

    Dr Wolfe was interviewed by the Toronto Star as an expert on visual perception and road safety regarding a redesigned intersection at Bloor and St. George in downtown Toronto.

    June 12, 2023

    The APPLY lab was busy at Vision Sciences Society this year! See our 2023 conference posters:

  • Where was the moose? The time course of dynamic road scene perception
  • When should you warn the driver about the moose?: The effect of auditory cue timing on hazard localization in naturalistic videos
  • Reducing the low-prevalence effect: Does similarity search translate to binary decisions?
  • Psychophysics of variable fonts: Gaze measures of reading efficiency
  • Psychophysics of variable fonts: Speed and comprehension measures
  • Individual differences in gaze behavior: Comparing high-level and sensory contributions