Benjamin Wolfe

Dr. Wolfe received his BA from Boston University, where he majored in Psychology. After two years as a research assistant at Vanderbilt University, he went on to earn his PhD in Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley. After completing his PhD, Dr. Wolfe spent several years in a postdoctoral position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he focused on using real-world situations to understand visual perception. As of January 2021, Dr. Wolfe will be an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, running the Applied Perception and Psychophysics LaboratorY (APPLY) at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

The Applied Perception and Psychophysics Laboratory focuses on questions at the intersection of vision science and real-world problems and takes a use-inspired approach to research. This approach means that the lab looks to real-world problems for what they can tell us about vision, and seeks to both increase our understanding of perceptual mechanisms while addressing timely problems in the world. Recently, Dr. Wolfe has been interested in examining how drivers learn about their environments, where people look in dynamic natural scenes, why visual distraction is particularly dangerous while driving, how drivers notice dangerous situations, how we can change text on screens to be better for individual readers and how and why we use peripheral vision to perceive the world. The lab is also interested in questions in spatial and binocular vision, and applying methods from visual psychophysics to improve the assessment of visual function in populations with visual impairments. For more details, please get in touch with Dr. Wolfe.