George Alvarez

Harvard University

The winner of the 2010 VSS Young Investigator Award is George Alvarez, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Alvarez has made exceptionally influential contributions to a number of research areas in vision and visual cognition. His work has uncovered principles that shape the efficient representation of information about objects and scenes in high level vision. He has also studied the way that high-level visual representations interact with attention and memory, revealing the functional organization and limitations of these processes. His work particularly illuminates the interfaces of vision, memory, and attention, systems that have classically been studied as separate entities. His creative experiments elegantly represent the diversity and vitality of the emerging field of visual cognition.