In 2011 Earl Miller and former student Timothy Buschman discovered that the cognitive capacity for perceiving things (for instance a car changing lanes or an onrushing football player) varies around the visual field for each person. In other words, a person might see something better if it’s in the upper left of their field of view than if it appeared in their upper right.

The insight led Miller and CEO Joshua Sarmir to co-found the company SplitSage, which has patented a process to assess visual field cognitive capacity for a wide variety of applications including personally optimized “heads up” displays, sports training such as in football, military training, and medical diagnostics.

For drivers, for example, a heads up display can be configured to put important information where the driver is most likely to see it and to be less distracting from the road. Sports/military teams can improve performance by learning how to exploit strong areas of their visual fields and mitigate the weak areas.  Plus, visual cognitive capacity correlates highly with level of cognitive function so the SplitSage process can be used as a diagnostic tool for assessing the cognitive benefits of therapeutics.