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Perception and Action Vision, Audition, and Action

Faculty: Bruce Berg Myron Braunstein Michael D'Zmura Barbara Dosher Jean-Claude Falmagne Gregory Hickok Donald Hoffman Tarow Indow Geoffrey Iverson Jeffrey Krichmar ** R. Duncan Luce Virginia Mann Kourosh Saberi ** George Sperling Ramesh Srinivasan Charles E. (Ted) Wright John. I. Yellott, Jr. Affiliated Faculty: Leonard M. Kitzes David Lyon Fan-Gang Zeng ** Member: National Academy of Sciences

Research and graduate training in perception and action is a major focus of the Cognitive Sciences faculty. The Department is internationally recognized as a leading center for quantitative research on perception. The Department's Perception and Action faculty and graduate students meet weekly for bag lunches and a seminar. These weekly meetings bring together not only departmental faculty but also faculty and students with related interests from a variety of campus units including Engineering, Information and Computer Science, Mathematics, and Neurobiology and Behavior. Vision Research in vision encompasses a wide range of areas. Current faculty research programs investigate: the mechanisms of contrast gain control in color vision; the density and packing arrangements of chromatically distinct cone types using psychophysics; the geometrical structure of color space; quantitative analysis of object color perception; the recovery of structure from motion; mechanisms for recovering 3D structure from dynamic 2D displays; mechanisms of attention in detecting color targets; metacontrast; texture perception; visual attention; binocular rivalry and visual consciousness; perceptual organization; three independent systems of visual motion perception and their relationship to the processes of attention and form perception. Audition Current faculty research programs in audition include: empirical studies of complex tone discrimination; speech perception; formal modeling of auditory threshold phenomena; formal analysis of psychophysical measurement and scaling; motion perception, models of binaural cross-correlation; Head-related Transfer Functions that produce perceptual externalization of headphone-delivered sounds used in virtual-reality systems. Action Research on action involves a quantitative analysis of the cognitive mechanisms necessary to learn and carry out skilled movements. Current faculty research addresses the central questions of motor-program representation and generalizability. These issues are studied using handwriting, rhythmic performance, aimed hand movements, and bimanual movements. The pursuit of these basic research questions has also led to several applied research projects involving clinical populations (patients with Alzheimer's dementia, Parkinson's disease, and focal dystonia of the hand) and handwriting pedagogy.

Cognitive Sciences
Psychology & Social Behavior
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