Malin Thyselius defended her half time (licentiate) thesis this morning, and did a stunning job. Her talk was calm, professional, insightful and funny (!). She fielded the questions from the committee brilliantly, coming up with many cool, new experiments while doing so. The committee members were impressed by her knowledge, and by the quality of her written work. It has been such an honor to be a part of Malin's journey: I first met her as a 1st year Biomedicin student in 2009!
By Karin, Malin Thyselius defended her half time (licentiate) thesis this morning, and did a stunning job. Her talk was calm, professional, insightful and funny (!). She fielded the questions from the committee brilliantly, coming up with many cool, new experiments while doing so. The committee members were impressed by her knowledge, and by the quality of her written work. It has been such an honor to be a part of Malin's journey: I first met her as a 1st year Biomedicin student in 2009!
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1. Karin is in Sweden
2. Malin is ready for her licentiate defense at the 24th of April. 3. The paper "Rearing and Long-Term Maintenance of Eristalis tenax Hoverflies for Research Studies" written by Sarah Nicholas, Malin Thyselius, Marissa Holden and Karin Nordströmis has been accepted. By Karin
The pollination project I am doing with the year 8 girls at Seymour College got mentioned in the advertiser today. Funky photo! By Karin I am currently collaborating with the amazing Sonya Arnold at Seymour College, providing feedback on their pollination project. Today the students were observing pollinator visits to their flower lures, and it was a true pleasure to watch how successfully they'd designed their flowers. The flowers displayed an amazing variety of colors, shapes, scents and sizes. I am so impressed by how the school is encouraging STEM subjects. by Sarah Nicholas This is a representation of the Ebbinghaus illusion, both orange circles are actually the same size, but why are our brains fooled by this? It’s all about context. When the surrounding circles are large we see the orange circle as small whereas when the surrounding circles are small the orange circle appears larger. We use this type of context to interpret if an object in a 2D image is small because of its actual size or because it is far away.
Interestingly this paper by Phillips et al showed that while adults see the orange circles as different sizes, children under the age of 7 are not so easily fooled. They hypothesize that this sensitivity to context develops slowly overtime due to increasing exposure and correct interpretation of 2D representations of 3D scenes. Are animals fooled by this illusion too? Some animals perceive this illusion in the same way as humans do, for instance the bottlenose dolphin. In contrast, dogs have been reported to see the exact opposite of this illusion, where the circle on the left appears larger and baboons don’t see the illusion at all. What about insects? A 2017 study by Dyer et al. showed that honeybees are also fooled by contextual size illusions, but only when viewed by free flying bees where they could view the illusion at any distance. However, when the bees were restricted to only viewing the illusion at one set distance they did not respond to the illusion. For those of us that design visual stimuli it’s important to not only take into account context but also to understand that what we see, as humans, could be vastly different from how the stimulus is perceived by insects and other animals. By Karin
I am currently collaborating with the STEM teacher Sonya Arnold at Seymour College to help their year 8 students learn about pollination and pollinators. It's a great experience meeting these talented young people. |
Hoverfly Vision
The hoverfly vision group can be found at 2 locations: At Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and at Uppsala University in Sweden. Archives
January 2022
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