Applied perception and neuroergonomics

Introduction Vision is critically important in many everyday tasks such as map reading, driving, and scanning computer displays. Neuroergonomics can provide methods and theories that can enhance our understanding of visual performance in such settings. This chapter describes the relevant methods and theories from psychophysics, neuropsychology, and cognitive neuroscience that can be used in the evaluation of different aspects of visual perception and cognition. These techniques can be used to understand how normal variation in visual perception and cognitive abilities influence performance on occupational and everyday visual tasks. They can also be used to examine how impairments due to neurological or psychiatric disorders, aging, drugs, and so on, affect visual performance. Psychological research in visual perception has a rich history of making contact with findings from neuroscience. Whether one goes back to the time of Helmholtz in the nineteenth century, or to the 1950s, when David Hubel, Torsten Wiesel, and others made their groundbreaking discoveries of lateral inhibition, the study of visual perception in particular has benefited greatly from an understanding of the neural structures that support vision. Many recent texts on vision reflect this joint use of evidence from both behavioral and brain science (e.g., Palmer, 1999; Ullman, 1997).