Igor S. Utochkin

2016, October-December - visiting scholar in Vision and Memory Laboratory, University of California San Diego (La Jolla, CA, USA)

2015, October-December - visiting scholar in Visual Attention Laboratory, Harvard Medical School/Brigham & Women's Hospital (Cambridge/Boston, MA, USA)

Best Teacher – 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013

Young Faculty Support Program (Group of Young Academic Professionals)
Category "Future Professoriate" (2015-2016)

2014: Member of the Editorial Board, Российский журнал когнитивной науки (The Russian Journal of Cognitive Science).

I am interested in visual perception and attention. My current work is focused on several main topics:
Ensemble perception. Despite our attention and visual working memory (VWM) have severely limited capacity - 3-4 objects at a time, at any given moment we still see much more than these 3-4 objects. Numerous studies of past decades show that this is possible because ensemble representation, the special mode of perception that allows us to see large sets of objects in the absence of the information about individuals. The visual system is believed to construct rather generalized images of ensembles via computing summary statistics, such as aprroximate number or average size, orientation, speed, brightness, even facial expression, etc. My research concerns two main issues: 1) The role of summary statistics in perceptual grouping, segmentation, and categorization: How can visual summary statistics be used by the visual system to decide which members of an ensemble belong to the same type of objects, and which members belong to different types; 2) What is the role of attention in extracting summary statistics?
Attention and visual search. Visual search is a very useful task for studying the deployment of attention over space and time. In visual search we can easily and independently manipulate numerous stimulus factors (the number of objects, their features, their similarity and dissimilarity, their density, etc.), as well as high-level sets via instructions and rewards. My specific interest in visual search focuses on the following question: How the statistical distribution of similar and dissimilar objects (as derived from statistical processing of a visual ensemble) affects the settings of the "attentional window", a hypothetical tradeoff between the number of immediately attended objects and the amount of capacity given to each of those objects?
Dead zone of attention. When perceiving a natural scene, one is normally attending to most significant objects or their parts. These are termed the "centers of interest" (CI), while other details of the scene are termed "marginal interests" (MI). My recent finding from the change blindness pardigm is that observers attend to MI's differently depending on the location of those MI's. Specifically, in my change blindness experiments participants failed to notice marginal changes for longer time in close proximity to a CI as compared to remote MI's. This effect was termed the dead zone of attention. The current research in my lab is indended to understand the nature of this effect. Is it elicited by some low-level spatial inhibition? Or is it caused by a high-level strategy of scene inspection?

General Psychology: Sensation and Perception (2nd year)
Experimental Psychology (3rd year)
Psychology of Errors and Illusions (elective, 2nd year)

Attention, Perception and Psychphysics

Journal of Optical Society of America A

Journal of Vision

PLOS One

The Russian Journal of Cognitive Science

Psychology. Journal of HSE