Imaging, visualization and computer graphics provide visual representations of data in order to communicate, provide insight and enhance problem solving.   The human observer actively processes these visual representations using perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that have evolved over millions of years.  The goal of this tutorial is to provide an introduction to these processing mechanisms, and to show how this knowledge can guide the decisions we make about how to represent data visually, how we visually represent patterns and relationships in data, and how we can use human pattern recognition to extract features in the data. 

This course will help the attendee:

• Understand basic principles of spatial, temporal, and color processing by the human visual system.
• Explore basic cognitive processes, including visual attention and semantics.
• Develop skills in applying knowledge about human perception and cognition to interactive visualization and computer graphics applications