About Us

Applied Perception & Psychophysics LaboratorY (APPLY) Group

Our research group is in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of Toronto Mississauga. We study visual perception and its application to real-world problems. The group is run by Dr. Benjamin Wolfe and Dr. Anna Kosovicheva, housing their specific research laboratories, and takes a use-inspired approach to vision science and cognitive psychology research, looking to the world for problems that can benefit from a vision science approach and that can, in turn, tell us about how visual perception works.

Wolfe Lab

The Wolfe Lab studies how we acquire visual information in real-world situations, mostly using driving as a tool to better understand visual perception, attention and behaviour, and the lab collaborates with researchers in U of T's Mechanical and Industrial Engineering program on much of this work.
driver holding a smartphone and a steering wheel

Read more about our research

Kosovicheva Lab

The Kosovicheva Lab studies individual differences in fundamental visual processes and the implications they have for perception in the real-world. Many real-world settings can benefit from an individual differences approach, including digital readability, collaborative tasks, and assessment of visual impairments.
people in a train station

Read more about our research

Social Media Updates & Lab News

Follow us on social media

View this profile on Instagram

APPLY LAB (@applylabutm) • Instagram photos and videos

May 12, 2026

Have a look at our lab's posters from the Vision Sciences Society meeting 2026:

  • Individual differences in identifying degraded stimuli: Language-specific and general mechanisms
  • When do real road hazards become predictable? Driver predictions of hazard location in dynamic road scenes
  • Saccadic Remapping in Dynamic Road Scenes
  • Effects of Feedback on Individual Differences in Attentional Asymmetries
  • Driver gaze behaviour when monitoring for road hazards: Effects of visual distraction
  • Individual Differences in the Perception of a Motion-Based Bistable Stimulus Based on Multiple Axes of Rotation

    • Have a look at our lab's posters from the Applied Vision Sciences meeting 2026:
  • Driver gaze monitoring for combatting distracted driving: A comparison of duration thresholds of eyes-off-road warnings and their effects on hazard detection
  • The impact of computer-aided detection systems on typo foraging

    • August 26, 2025

    Welcome our new ROP & work-study students: Mahveen, Shiraz, Camila, Maria, and Lucia!

    May 20, 2025

    Have a look at our lab's posters from the Vision Sciences Society meeting this year:

  • Individual Differences in Visual Sensitivity and Distribution of Covert Attention Around the Visual Field
  • The impact of font on typo detection: a novel visual search paradigm
  • Different strokes for different folks! Do multiple font features interact to impact readability?
  • The Great Binocular Bake Off: Comparing Methods for Measuring Interocular Delays
  • Biases in predictions of dynamic natural scenes: Contributions of motion and scene content on the accuracy and precision of prediction
  • How much visual field loss can you tolerate on the road? Impact of central and peripheral scotomas on road hazard localization

    • March 4, 2025

    Dr Wolfe was interviewed by the UTM News about his new project with Dr. Birsen Donmez, “A Foundation for Next-Generation Driver Distraction Detection and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS).” This project will be using the funding he recieved from the Enhanced Road Safety Transfer Payment Program (ERSTPP) by Transport Canada!

    December 6, 2024

    Congratulations to Dr. Wolfe for securing funding from the Enhanced Road Safety Transfer Payment Program (ERSTPP) by Transport Canada! This funding will go towards a project titled A Foundation for Next-Generation Driver Distraction Detection and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems which plans to examine how distractions cause people to miss road hazards using eye tracking! This project is in collaboration with Dr. Birsen Donmez’s Human Factors and Applied Statistics Lab at UofT’s Mechanical and Industrial Engineering department.

    May 18, 2024

    See our lab's posters from the Vision Sciences Society meeting this year:

  • The effects of variable fonts on sentence-level reading
  • Did you look at the moose? Driver gaze behaviour while searching for hazards in dynamic road scenes
  • Follow the Dot: Do we have implicit awareness of our own eye movements?

    • August 31, 2023

    Dr Wolfe was interviewed by the Toronto Star as an expert on visual perception and road safety regarding a redesigned intersection at Bloor and St. George in downtown Toronto.

    June 12, 2023

    The APPLY lab was busy at Vision Sciences Society this year! See our 2023 conference posters:

  • Where was the moose? The time course of dynamic road scene perception
  • When should you warn the driver about the moose?: The effect of auditory cue timing on hazard localization in naturalistic videos
  • Reducing the low-prevalence effect: Does similarity search translate to binary decisions?
  • Psychophysics of variable fonts: Gaze measures of reading efficiency
  • Psychophysics of variable fonts: Speed and comprehension measures
  • Individual differences in gaze behavior: Comparing high-level and sensory contributions