The major goal of faculty members studying perception is to understand how the brain creates our perception of the world around us. Questions addressed by our investigators include:
- How do we interpret and perceive sensory stimuli (for example, images, sounds, and touch)?
- How does the activity of neurons relate to what we perceive?
- How do we parse a sensory environment with many objects, how are neurons responsible for this, and how does attention influence what we perceive?
- How do we perceive objects that share common properties as belonging to the same category? For example, how can we tell that a large picture of an orange cat and a small picture of a black cat taken from different angles both represent a cat?
- What are the principles guiding how we perceive and categorize sensory stimuli, and how are neurons responsible for this?
- When what we perceive differs from what is physically in the world, like during an illusion, how does this relate to principles of perception and neuronal activity?
- How do we integrate information from multiple senses, and how does the perception of one sense affect the perception of another sense?
- How do we perceive information from multiple senses when they are mismatched?
Faculty studying perception
In-House
- Marie Burns, PhD
- Xiaomo Chen, PhD
- Jochen Ditterich, PhD
- Mark Goldman, PhD
- Tim Hanks, PhD
- Gregg Recanzone, PhD
- Mitchell Sutter, PhD
- W. Martin Usrey, PhD
- Andrew Yonelinas, PhD