Karen Schloss

Karen Schloss is an Associate Professor and Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Area Group Chair at the University of Wisconsin–Madison's Department of Psychology, affiliated with the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery’s Virtual Environments Group. Her research focuses on visual reasoning, color semantics, and immersive educational tools via virtual reality. She earned her BA from Barnard College (Columbia University, 2005) and PhD in Psychology from UC Berkeley (2011), followed by postdoctoral work there until 2013. Before joining UW-Madison in 2016, she was an Assistant Professor of Research at Brown University.

Her lab explores how visual features like color convey meaning in information visualization and cognition. Recent work includes the UW Virtual Brain Project (VR neuroanatomy education) and NSF CAREER-funded studies on visual reasoning. She received the Psychonomic Society’s Steve Yantis Early Career Award.

Key research themes include color-concept associations, colormap data interpretation, and semantic discriminability theory. Her lab emphasizes translational applications, such as improving scientific communication through VR and optimizing color use in visual displays.

Notable collaborations include work with the WID Virtual Environments Group. Advising includes PhD graduate Dr. Melissa Schoenlein and undergraduates presenting at research symposia. Current projects address color perception biases, multimodal learning, and AI-driven semantic prediction.