The world that we see is only a small bit of the total amount of information hitting our eyeballs at any given second.  My dissertation research focused on how the visual system sifts through the massive amounts of data to eventually give us a visual percept.  The outcome of my research was that the visual system uses past experience to inform even the earliest moments of visual processing, an idea that runs contrary to established models of visual perception.  

 

I used psychophysiological measures, like evoked EEG, EEG time-frequency analysis, eye-tracking, and unconscious priming and masking to investigate how early in time past experience influences visual processing, and to support models of vision that incorporate feedback between visual processing areas.