Benjamin Wolfe

Dr. Wolfe received his BA in Psychology from Boston University, received additional training over the course of two years as a research assistant at Vanderbilt University, and went to earn his PhD in Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley in 2015. After completing his PhD, Dr. Wolfe spent several years in a postdoctoral position in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he focused on using real-world situations to understand visual perception. At the University of Toronto, Dr. Wolfe is a director of the APPLY Lab (www.applylab.org), the Applied Perception and Psychophysics Laboratory, based at the University of Toronto Mississauga campus. 

The APPLY Lab focuses on use-inspired research at the intersection of vision science and real-world problems, and Dr. Wolfe leads research in understanding the visual perceptual underpinnings of driver behaviour (how drivers see the world) and digital readability (how the appearance of text changes reading behaviour). The lab is broadly interested in questions of visual attention, scene perception and peripheral vision, particularly as they apply to naturalistic situations. Dr. Wolfe's research bridges visual psychophysics and human factors, looking to the world for questions that can help us understand how vision works in daily life and what that means for improving the world. Dr. Wolfe is affiliated with the PsychEng program, the Data Sciences Institute and the Mobility Network at the University of Toronto, as well as the Centre for Vision Research at York University. Students interested in working with Dr. Wolfe for a PhD in Psychology should contact him directly, as should students finishing their PhDs and looking for postdoctoral positions.