On 23 September, we launched Visual Sparks, a new virtual talk series that gives early-career researchers a platform to present new work in active vision science. Our first speaker was Merve Erdogan (Perception & Cognition Lab, Yale University). She spoke about “Visual Cognition on the Move: From Biological Motion to Intuitive Physics in ‘Point-Light’ Scenes.”

Merve asked how special and domain-specific the rich percepts from point-light displays are. She presented studies on the speed limits of biological motion perception, on point-light cloths that convey intuitive physics without agents, and on how robust such displays remain when their size and location change from moment to moment. She closed with new directions on whether the perceived and actual positions of our eyes and hands can come apart. Thank you, Merve, for kicking off the series.

The next Visual Sparks talk takes place on 28 October. If you would like to join future talks, please write to rolfslab@gmail.com.