Associate Professor
College of Letters and Science | Department of Psychology and Wisconsin Institute for Discovery
Hometown: Baltimore, Maryland and New York, NY
Karen Schloss is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the Department of Psychology and Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. Her Visual Reasoning Lab studies how people interpret meaning from visual features, with the goal of making visual communication more effective and efficient. Dr. Schloss received her BA from Barnard College, Columbia University in 2005, with a major in Psychology and a minor in Architecture. She completed her Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley in 2011 and continued on as a Postdoctoral Scholar from 2011-2013. She spent three years as an Assistant Professor of Research in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University before joining the faculty at UW–Madison in 2016. Dr. Schloss was awarded the Steve Yantis Early Career Award from the Psychonomic Society, and her lab is supported by an NSF CAREER award on Visual Reasoning for Visual Communication.
Talks:
That color means what? The meanings of colors for visual communication
Visual communication is fundamental to how humans share information. People use information visualizations (e.g., maps, charts, diagrams, and signage) to help others navigate new environments, track perilous weather patterns, learn about scientific discoveries, and indicate where to discard different types of recyclables, to name a few examples. I will discuss how people interpret meanings of colors in information visualizations, and how we can make visual communication more effective and efficient.
What's your favorite color?
Have you ever wondered why you like some colors more than others, and why you have color preferences at all? I will discuss how we form our color preferences, why different people have different color preferences and why our color preferences change with the seasons.