Badger Talk: What’s Your Favorite Color?

This is a free, in-person talk hosted on October 22, 2026 at 6:00 PM by Holmen Public Library in Holmen, WI. No registration required. This talk will not be available virtually. This event is a part of the Wisconsin Science Festival! Have you ever wondered why you like some colors more than others, and why you have color preferences at all? I will discuss how we form our color preferences, why different people have different color preferences and why color preferences change with the season. 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 the goal of making visual communication more effective and efficient. 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. 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.