Jonathan Peirce

My research is in visual neuroscience. I'm interested in how we recognise things visually. Surely we must know all that already?! No, not by a long way.

We know a lot about the eye and we do a reasonable job of making devices (digital cameras) that do a roughly similar job. But imagine a piece of computer software that took your digital photographs and identified what was happening in them. "This is a photo of your father, sitting on a wooden chair with a carving of a rose on it. Next to him is a Yorkshire terrier chewing a bone."

For you it's trivial because of your visual neurons. But the world's best programmers are nowhere near being able to do that with computers. Google and Facebook do now have face recognition capabilities built in to their photo applications, and they work reasonably, just as long as the person doesn't turn their head too far or put on glasses. Would that ever confuse you when you recognise a face? Have you noticed the number of websites that ask you to type in the words that are portrayed in a swirly image? That's because your recognition is so much better than any autoated computer detection system.

We need to know how the brain does such a remarkable job of perceiving the world. That is the endeavour of visual neuroscience.

Within the field I'm particularly interested in the following topics, with further information below.

• Mid-level vision
• Color perception
• Face perception
• Experimental design and software

To study these I use psychophysics, computational modelling, fMRI and electrophysiology.

Mid level Vision

A great deal is known about the initial steps of visual processing. We know that humans have neural mechanisms selectively tuned to simple patterns of particular spatial frequencies and orientations. Much later in the visual pathway, in inferotemporal (IT) cortex, cells respond to extremely complex visual patterns such as images of faces. Very little is known about intermediate levels of visual processing, where early visual signals are presumably combined to represent increasingly complex visual eatures.

Characterising those intermediate mechanisms is the primary interest of my lab. That work has led us to present psychophysical evidence for visual mechanisms detecting conjunctions, such as detectors for plaids and detectors for curvature.

Experimental methods and software

As a result of my research I also developed the free psychophysics software package, PsychoPy. This software is now used in several hundred labs worldwide and can be used both for undergraduate teaching and for research in psychophysics, neuroscience and psychology.

Cloud of interests

This was created by inserting the text of my 2010 publications (including PsychoPy manual) into TagCrowd: