Faculty

Ben van Buren studies visual perception and cognition and directs the New School Perception Laboratory http://www.nssrperception.com/.

In one line of research, Ben investigates how we perceive seemingly invisible things. We don't just see that objects are moving — we also see why they are moving. We irresistibly perceive objects' movements as caused by physical forces acting on them, or as directed toward particular goals (such as the intention to chase a target), if they move in specific ways. Ben studies what drives these intriguing perceptual phenomena, and how they provide a foundation for our subsequent physical and social understanding of the world.

In another line of work, together with collaborators in the Psychology department and at Parsons School of Design, Ben conducts experiments to study how specific processes of visual perception and attention support downstream cognitive, affective and motor processes in design contexts. For example, recent projects from the Perception Lab have demonstrated how designers can leverage knowledge about early, automatic visual processing to aid observers' understanding of what icons are intended to communicate, and to influence whether players experience competetive games as fair or unfair.

Ben teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on visual perception and cognition and behavioral research methods. Together with Professor Colleen Macklin at Parsons, he teaches an applied psychology and design seminar focused on game UX design, which is typically taken by graduate students in the Psychology and Design & Technology programs.

Ph.D., Cognitive Psychology (Yale University)

B.A., Cognitive Science, Philosophy (University of Pennsylvania)

For a complete list of publications, please visit Ben's Google Scholar page.

Sample publications:

Dunin, D., Ongchoco, J. D. K., and van Buren, B. F. (2025). Remembering facial age: Assimilation in memory toward categories of ‘Young’ and ‘Old’. Cognition, 264, 106223. PDF

Nguyen, H. B., and van Buren, B. F. (2024). Attentional transplants for industrial applications. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality & 3D User Interfaces, pp. 291-293. [Conference Proceedings] PDF

Nguyen, H. B., and van Buren, B. (2024). Rotating objects cue spatial attention via the perception of frictive surface contact. Cognition, 242, 1-9. PDF

Nguyen, H. B., and van Buren, B. (2023). May the Force be against you: Better visual sensitivity to speed changes opposite to gravity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 49, 1016-1030. PDF

Ritchie, J. B., and van Buren, B. (2020). When scenes look like Materials: The reversable figure-ground motif in the paintings of René Magritte. Art and Perception, 8, 1-12. PDF

van Buren, B., and Scholl, B. J. (2018). Visual illusions as a tool for dissociating seeing from thinking. Perception, 47, 999-1001. PDF

van Buren, B., and Scholl, B. J. (2017). Minds in motion in memory: Enhanced spatial memory driven by the perceived animacy of simple shapes. Cognition, 163, 87-92. PDF

van Buren, B., Bromberger, B., Potts, D., and Chatterjee, A. (2013). Changes in painting styles of two artists with Alzheimer's disease. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 7, 89-94. PDF