Karen Schloss

Research Area(s)
Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience
Perception

Lab Website
Schloss Visual Reasoning Lab

Research Interests
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 a focus on color. Her research addresses fundamental questions in information visualization and visual cognition, with the goal of making visual communication more effective and efficient. As part of the WID Virtual Environments group, her lab also develops virtual reality educational tools to help make science accessible and engaging. 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. In 2022, Dr. Schloss was promoted to Associate Professor. 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.

Representative Publications
Schoenlein, M. A., Campos, J., Lande, K. J., Lessard, L., & Schloss, K. B. (2023). Unifying Effects of Direct and Relational Associations for Visual Communication. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

Schoenlein, M. A. & Schloss, K. B. (2022). Color-concept association formation for novel concepts. Visual Cognition.

Mukherjee, K., Yin, B., Sherman, B. E., Lessard, L., & Schloss, K. B., (2022). Context matters: A theory of semantic discriminability for perceptual encoding systems. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 28, 1, 697-706.

Bartel, A. N., Lande, K. J., Roos, J., & Schloss, K. B. (2021). A holey perspective on Venn diagrams. Cognitive Science, 46, 1, e13073.

Schloss, K. B., Schoenlein, M. A., Tredinnick, R., Smith, S. Miller, N. Racey, C. Castro, C. Rokers, B. (2021-online). The UW Virtual Brain Project: An immersive approach to teaching functional neuroanatomy. Translational Issues in Psychological Science.

Schloss, K. B., Leggon, Z., Lessard, L. (2021). Semantic discriminability for visual communication. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 27, 2, 1022-1031.

Sibrel, S. C., Rathore, R., Lessard, L., & Schloss, K. B., (2020). The relation between color and spatial structure for interpreting colormap data visualizations. Journal of Vision, 20, 7, 1-20.

Schloss, K. B., Witzel, C., & Lai, L. Y. Blue hues don’t bring the blues: questioning conventional notions of color-emotion associations. Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 37, 5, 813-824.

Rathore, R., Leggon, Z., Lessard, L., Schloss, K. B. (2020). Estimating color-concept associations from image statistics. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 26, 1, 1226-1235.