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Our visual world consists of outlier objects that differ from their surrounding environments and capture attention. Outlier detection plays a critical role for the survival of the organism and enables the completion of daily critical tasks. Tasks like, detecting a lung tumor, a knife in a carry-on, or an animal that suddenly jumps onto the highway all require outlier detection; in all these instances, there are features/objects that are visually and/or semantically differentiated from their surrounding context with an outlier feature. Spatial attention mechanisms enable the detection such items and carry out the task at hand accurately. While most studies to date have showed that outliers are detected automatically and rapidly; few have argued that visual and spatial attention processes as well as spatial biases may influence outlier detection. In this project, the effect of spatial attention processes on outlier detection will be investigated. The aim is to investigate the facilitatory/inhibitory role of visuospatial attention processes on outlier items’ detection and representation.

The culture and norms of research laboratories can greatly influence the quality of scientific outputs produced by the lab and the well-being of its members. In most labs, the culture that governs how individual researchers behave in their work is often implicit and situational. In contrast, some labs develop their own lab manual, a written document that outlines their standard functioning. Such a lab manual can ensure that lab members have a shared and mutual understanding of who they are and how they do things. We argue that every lab could benefit from a lab manual because it facilitates efficient collaboration, reduces potential research mistakes, and aids the integration of new good research practices.Developing a lab manual without a doubt requires extra effort. To decrease researchers’ burden of creating their own lab manual, we provide a lab manual template that outlines the different topics that could be included in a manual. Moreover, we introduce an easy-to-use web app, blueprint, that further simplifies the process of creating a lab manual using our template. The present paper aims to serve as a guide for those who would like to partake in this endeavor.

Our visual world consists of outlier objects that differ from their surrounding environments and capture attention. Outlier detection plays a critical role for the survival of the organism and enables the completion of daily critical tasks. Tasks like, detecting a lung tumor, a knife in a carry-on, or an animal that suddenly jumps onto the highway all require outlier detection; in all these instances, there are features/objects that are visually and/or semantically differentiated from their surrounding context with an outlier feature. Spatial attention mechanisms enable the detection such items and carry out the task at hand accurately. While most studies to date have showed that outliers are detected automatically and rapidly; few have argued that visual and spatial attention processes as well as spatial biases may influence outlier detection. In this project, the effect of spatial attention processes on outlier detection will be investigated. The aim is to investigate the facilitatory/inhibitory role of visuospatial attention processes on outlier items’ detection and representation.