AVA Awards Recipients Report - Abigail Lee - 2019

Geoffrey J. Burton Memorial Award

With the support of the Geoffrey J. Burton Memorial Award, I was able to attend the Vision Sciences Society 2019 Annual Meeting (VSS 2019) from May 17th – 22nd 2019 and present a poster on “Exploring how distance and duration information contributes to speed change discrimination”. VSS is a conference that I always look forward to, and this was my third time attending. However, this year had added significance for me: as a final year PhD student, this was my last opportunity of my studies to present my work at an international conference. 

The focus of my PhD research has been on motion perception, and I am particularly interested in how people make judgements about speed. Usually, when asking participants to discriminate between two speeds, the design of these tasks means participants can use distance or duration information to complete the task instead of speed, which is not ideal. One way to get around this issue is to use a speed change discrimination task, which can be designed so that distance and duration information cannot be used to make judgements, ensuring participants only use speed information. These tasks typically consist of one interval with motion at a constant speed, and another interval containing an instantaneous speed change. However, speed change discrimination tasks are more difficult than speed discrimination tasks, although it is unclear why. 

In my poster at VSS 2019 I presented research conducted by myself and my PhD supervisors (Professor Julie Harris and Dr Justin Ales; both at the University of St Andrews) on whether distance and duration cues were used to complete speed discrimination tasks instead of speed information, and whether speed change discrimination was difficult because usually distance and duration cannot be used in these tasks. We concluded that participants use speed information for both speed and speed change discrimination tasks. My poster presentation was an excellent opportunity to discuss my work with other vision scientists, and I got some great feedback which will really help me as I write my thesis.

Outside of my poster presentation at VSS, I did as much networking as possible. The Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting is an excellent opportunity to meet other vision scientists, and there are many workshops and socials which encourage us to network and meet new people. This year I attended the Canadian Vision Social, designed for vision scientists who work, or would like to work, in Canada, and the FoVea (Females of Vision et al) workshop on “Navigating a Life in Science as a Woman”. Both were great opportunities to meet fellow vision scientists. The FoVea event also helped me to feel like I belong as a vision scientist, and that I am a part of a supportive community of women and allies doing vision science. Outside of the workshops, I also met face-to-face with a principle investigator about a possible postdoctoral position, which was a great opportunity to learn more about the position and the principle investigator’s wider research. On top of this, I met a group of people that previously I had only known from academic Twitter. This was both great fun and demonstrated to me that having an academic presence on social media is a really good way to get to know more PhD students and early career researchers who are also interested in vision. 

Overall, attending VSS 2019 was a fantastic experience and I am very grateful to the AVA for this award to help me attend this conference.

- Abigail Lee