Research — Michael Karlovich

Research

How the brain assembles a coherent reality, and how that process fails. The work spans visual perception, attention, the neuroscience of aesthetics, and the neuropathology of neurodegenerative disease.

Focus

Current interests

Applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning in digital neuropathology

Visual perception, visual illusions, and cognitive disagreements

Inattentional blindness and attention capture

The cognitive neuroscience and psychology of visual aesthetics

On the back burner: neural correlates of visual consciousness; the cognitive electrophysiology of meditation. Earlier work: sudden unexpected death in epilepsy; novel epilepsy treatments.

Highlights

Three that traveled

Work that left the journals and reached a much wider audience.

The Visible Gorilla

A project I began in 2014 with NYU neuroscientist Pascal Wallisch, Ph.D., recently published in PNAS. It challenges the widely accepted theory of inattentional blindness by showing that people can perceive unexpected stimuli even while engrossed in a demanding task, provided the stimulus is moving quickly. To our knowledge the largest inattentional-blindness dataset ever collected (n = 4,493), it reframes speed as a bottom-up factor that strongly influences what we notice, with real implications for safety and human factors.

Crocs & Socks

Research on perceptual disagreement: the first work to lay out how to deliberately construct ambiguous color displays, in the tradition of "The Dress," that split viewers. Featured in Scientific American and the subject of an entire chapter of David McRaney's book "How Minds Change."

Scintillating Starburst

A new class of illusion, discovered while I was designing the Recursia logo: concentric star polygons induce vivid illusory rays. The paper sits in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric, and was a finalist for the 2020 Illusion of the Year.

Publications

Peer-reviewed & preprint

The visible gorilla: Unexpected fast, not physically salient, objects are noticeable PNAS 2023

Wallisch P, Mackey WE, Karlovich MW, Heeger DJ

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 120(22):e2214930120 (2023) · doi:10.1073/pnas.2214930120

Scintillating Starbursts: Concentric Star Polygons Induce Illusory Ray Patterns

Karlovich MW, Wallisch P

i-Perception (2021) · doi:10.1177/20416695211018720

Disagreeing about Crocs and socks: Creating profoundly ambiguous color displays

Wallisch P, Karlovich M

Frontiers in Psychology (accepted) · arXiv:1908.05736

Temporal trends and autopsy findings of SUDEP based on medico-legal investigations in the United States

Cihan E, Devinsky O, Hesdorffer DC, Brandsoy M, Li L, Fowler DR, Graham JK, Karlovich MW, Yang JE, Keller AE, Donner EJ, Friedman D

Neurology 95(7):e867–e877 (2020)

Socioeconomic disparities in SUDEP in the US Neurology® cover

Cihan E, Hesdorffer DC, Brandsoy M, Li L, Fowler DR, Graham JK, Karlovich M, Donner EJ, Devinsky O, Friedman D

Neurology 94(24):e2555–e2566 (2020)

Lorcaserin therapy for severe epilepsy of childhood onset: A case series

Tolete P, Knupp K, Karlovich M, DeCarlo E, Bluvstein J, Conway E, Friedman D, Dugan P, Devinsky O

Neurology 91(18):837–839 (2018)

Publication records for the PNAS and Neurology papers verified against PubMed.