Oscar Solis
PhD student

Profile

Biography

I completed my undergraduate degree in ‘Natural Sciences specialising in Neuroscience’ at the University of York. Throughout this time, I was a research assistant for Dr Karla Evans in the Complex Cognitive Processing lab, working on projects related to scene gist processing and crossmodal visual search.

Career

• PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, Department of Psychology, University of York
  (September 2024 to present)
• Research assistant for Dr Karla Evans, Complex Cognitive Processing Lab, University of York (May
  2020 to June 2024)
• MSci Natural Sciences specialising in Neuroscience, School of Natural Sciences, University of York
  (September 2020 to June 2024)

Research

Overview

Scene Complexity Perception and Image Memorability

Projects

Given two images, you can effortlessly judge which one would be more “complex”. Your response would even be consistent with other people’s. Recent work from our lab (Kyle-Davidson et al., 2025), as well as others (Saraee et al., 2020; Chai et al., 2010) have shown that more complex images tend to be more memorable, and thus, the current project aims to further investigate this relationship. We first reconsider “human complexity perception”, a term that is difficult to define and, even more so, to operationalise. There are many advantages to quantifying the complexity of an image computationally, but these often fall short of fully capturing what affords humans this perception (though see Kyle-Davidson et al., 2023). Tools such as these will then allow us to investigate the neural substrates and temporal dynamics of scene complexity perception and its relationship with image memorability. Understanding this relationship will give us insights into the mechanisms underlying our long-term visual memory, which we tend to take for granted in our everyday lives.

Research group(s)

• Complex Cognitive Processing Lab

Collaborators

• Dr Karla K. Evans (supervisor, University of York)
• Prof Alex Wade (supervisor, University of York)

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Perception and Cognition 1 & 2
• Brain and Behaviour 1 & 2

Publications

Selected publications

Kyle-Davidson, C., Solis, O., Robinson, S., Tan, R. T. W., & Evans, K. K. (2025). Scene complexity and the detail trace of human long-term visual memory. Vision Research, 227, 108525.