Alum Bill Warren 72F P10 Honored with Vision Science Award
William H. Warren 72F P10 has been awarded the 2023 Ken Nakayama Medal for Excellence in Vision Science. The award from the Vision Sciences Society (VSS) is one of the highest honors in the field of vision research and is presented for high-impact work.
Warren received the award for his groundbreaking experiments on the visual control of action, among the first to use mobile virtual reality in vision research. He was cited for “introducing the VSS community to a new way of considering vision.”
“By using computer graphics, we test how the visual system determines one's future path from information such as optic flow in order to characterize the functions that the brain must perform,” Warren writes. “The ultimate aim of this research is to understand how adaptive behavior emerges from the dynamic interaction of an organism and its environment. This research contributes to a foundation of basic knowledge that is needed to understand visual-motor disorders and mobility problems in humans, and to develop mobile robots that can operate in novel environments such as the surface of Mars.”
Warren’s research investigates how people perceive the layout and affordances of their environment, and use visual information to guide locomotion and navigation. He is currently studying the self-organization of collective behavior in human crowds.
He credits Hampshire with shaping his creative and interdisciplinary approach to understanding human perception and action, which combines philosophical questions, behavioral experiments, physical models, and inspiration from other species ranging from honeybees to bird flocks. As a student member of the original School of Language and Communications (which invented the field of cognitive science before it had a name), Warren worked with Profs. Jim Koplin in psychology, Ray Coppinger in biology, and Chris Witherspoon and Michael Radetsky in philosophy.
Warren is currently Chancellor’s Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University, and the president of the International Society for Ecological Psychology. His partner is Ellie Siegel 72F, who recently retired as co-director of the Writing Program at Hampshire, and his son, Jonah Siegel-Warren, is a proud Hampshire alum.
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