Arryn Robbins

University of Richmond | UR

Imagine you are in your backyard, bird watching with your friends. Your eyes look upward, scanning the trees and sky. What birds would you expect to find? What do you think they might look like? Consider how the environment you are searching within (your backyard) gives you clues about where to look for birds. Your eyes are likely to scan the trees...

This report is an analysis of interim research findings, public data sets, and other resources during the 4th quarter of 2020 to explore traffic safety during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. This report includes data from EMS, speed databases, and from a study on the prevalence of drugs and alcohol among seriously and fatally injured ro...

Domain-specific expertise changes the way people perceive, process, and remember information from that domain. This is often observed in visual domains involving skilled searches, such as athletics referees, or professional visual searchers (e.g., security and medical screeners). Although existing research has compared expert to novice performance...

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is continuing its exploration of traffic safety during the COVID-19 public health emergency. This work is crucial to furthering our understanding of changes in potentially dangerous driving behaviors, and allows us to expand or evolve countermeasures to meet current needs in States and acro...

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is reviewing national changes in roadway travel and changes in drivers’ behavior that have occurred since the start of the COVID-19 public health emergency, with an emphasis on the second quarter (Q2) of 2020. Most important, we are learning about the impact on motor ve-hicle crashes and fatalities...

The degree to which an item is rated as being a typical member of its category influences an observer's ability to find that item during word-cued search. However, there are conflicting accounts as to whether or not typicality affects attentional guidance to categorical items, or whether it affects some other aspect of the search process. In this s...

During categorical search (e.g., "look for a dog"), observers have broad information about their intended target, but no specific details about the target's precise appearance. Research suggests that mental representations used to guide attention during categorical search (or search templates) comprise typical or category consistent features. Unlik...

Studies show that the average person asks about 20 questions per day! Of course, some of these questions can be simple, like asking your teacher if you can use the bathroom, but some can be more complex and challenging to find an answer. That is where statistics comes in handy! Statistics allows us to draw conclusions from a set of data and is ofte...

Think about how often you search your messy room for lost objects, or search the fridge for a snack. Visual search is the process of finding things like keys, lost toys, clothes, and anything else you may need to find. It is a complex mental task we perform countless times throughout each day. It seems relatively simple for us to find someone (like...

Searching for items in one’s environment often includes considerable reliance on semantic knowledge. The present study examines the importance of semantic information in visual and memory search, especially with respect to whether the items reside in long-term or working memory. In Experiment 1, participants engaged in hybrid visual memory search f...

In the following experiments, we examined whether perceptions of naturalness in architecture are linked to objective visual patterns, and we investigated how natural patterns influence aesthetic evaluations of architectural scenes. Experiment 1 revealed that visual patterns of architecture explained over half of the variance in scene naturalness ra...

Exposure to natural environments, compared to built spaces, has been shown to confer important psychological benefits. Furthermore, people generally exhibit preferences for natural landscapes over man-made buildings. However, some forms of architectural design draw inspiration from natural systems and thus exhibit similar sensory qualities as natur...

Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a statistical technique commonly used to model the psychological similarity among sets of stimulus items. Typically, MDS has been used with relatively small stimulus sets (30 items or fewer), in part due to the laborious nature of computational analysis and data collection. Modern computing power and newly advanced...

Unlike in laboratory visual search tasks-wherein participants are typically presented with a pictorial representation of the item they are asked to seek out-in real-world searches, the observer rarely has veridical knowledge of the visual features that define their target. During categorical search, observers look for any instance of a categoricall...

A number of real-world scenarios involve pairs or teams of individuals searching collaboratively for complex targets. In an attempt to examine these types of scenarios, our recent research has demonstrated that, relative to a solo searcher, collaborative searchers exhibit higher response accuracy when engaged in complex visual search tasks. In the...

To search for targets in scenes filled with distractors, observers must utilize mental representations ("templates") for those targets (e.g. where are my keys). While previous research on "hybrid search" has demonstrated that observers can search for any of hundreds of distinct targets, little is known about the internal representation of those tar...

What information do people use to guide search when they lack precise details about the appearance of their target? In this study, we employed categorical (word-cued) search and eye tracking, to examine how category typicality influences search performance. We found that typical category members were fixated and identified more quickly than atypica...

Visual search is one of the most widely studied topics in vision science, both as an independent topic of interest, and as a tool for studying attention and visual cognition. A wide literature exists that seeks to understand how people find things under varying conditions of difficulty and complexity, and in situations ranging from the mundane (e.g...

Stress, worry and anxiety have long been known to influence a broad array of behavioral functions. Here, we examined how stress influences fixational stability. Fixational stability is known to be heightened in experts (e.g., snipers; Di Russo et al., 2003), but impoverished both in individuals with pathological attention deficits (e.g., ADHD; Muno...

It is well established that emotional distractors enhance attentional control in demanding tasks such as the classic attentional blink paradigm (Olivers & Nieuwenhuis, 2005; Sussman, Heller, Miller, & Mohanty, 2013). By inducing a range of moods using music and memory generation, it has also been shown that the interaction of emotional valence and...

Gaze-tracking technology lets us play video games, control gadgets and diagnose disease through the eyes alone. It can also reveal a lot about how we think and feel