Cognitive psychology has devoted a lot of attention to the study of vision, but surprisingly little attention to visual problem solving. The dearth of visual cognition research is especially true for visual spaces larger than a 17inch monitor. And yet people engage in a broad range of complex visual problem solving tasks that involve multiple monitors, wall displays, and information displayed in more than simple 2D form. At the same time, the bulk of our visual information comes in through a very small foveal window and is stored in a very small visual working memory. We try to forge new understandings of how rich visual information is represented mentally and how it guides complex problem solving.

When bigger is better. Why are two screens better than one for solving problems? You can only see a small part of one screen. That much screen space should not matter. But the effect on problem solving is actually quite large (for tasks that require integration of information across screens). We want to know why.

Solving big problems with a little brain. Estimates of visual working memory size put it around 2 to 5 chunks of information, depending on the person. That is a tiny amount of information. Yet, all humans can solving fairly complex visual problems, some in ways that are much more efficent than computers, integrating global information into local activities. How can that be done using such a small visual working memory? We have been collecting eye-tracking data and bulding computational models of visual problem solving to uncover the answer.