The Laboratory for Computational Neuroscience (Coen-Cagli lab) invites applications for a postdoctoral position at Albert Einstein College of Medicine (Einstein) in the Bronx, New York City. The position is available immediately, it is funded for two years through a NIH training grant to the Rose F. Kennedy IDDRC at Einstein, and targets eligible candidates interested in careers in the biomedical sciences focused on the neurobiological underpinnings of neurodevelopmental disorders associated with intellectual disability and autism. The candidate will have the opportunity learn and apply an integrated approach that leverages innovative experiments and computational modeling of perceptual grouping and segmentation developed by the Coen-Cagli lab, to test theories of sensory processing in autism, in collaboration with the Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory (Molholm lab) at Einstein.

The Laboratory for Computational Neuroscience (Coen-Cagli lab) invites applications for a postdoctoral position at Albert Einstein College of Medicine (Einstein) in the Bronx, New York City. The position is available immediately, it is funded for two years through a NIH training grant to the Rose F. Kennedy IDDRC at Einstein, and targets eligible candidates interested in careers in the biomedical sciences focused on the neurobiological underpinnings of neurodevelopmental disorders associated with intellectual disability and autism. The candidate will have the opportunity learn and apply an integrated approach that leverages innovative experiments and computational modeling of perceptual grouping and segmentation developed by the Coen-Cagli lab, to test theories of sensory processing in autism, in collaboration with the Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory (Molholm lab) at Einstein.

Figure-ground organisation and perceptual grouping are classic topics in Gestalt and perceptual psychology. They often appear alongside one another in introductory textbook chapters on perception and have a long history of investigation. However, they are typically discussed as separate processes of perceptual organisation with their own distinct phenomena and mechanisms. Here, I will propose that perceptual grouping and figure-ground organisation are strongly linked. In particular, perceptual grouping can provide a basis for, and may share mechanisms with, a wide range of figure-ground principles. To support this claim, I will describe a new class of figure-ground principles based on perceptual grouping between edges and demonstrate that this inter-edge grouping (IEG) is a powerful influence on figure-ground organisation. I will also draw support from our other results showing that grouping between edges and regions (i.e., edge-region grouping) can affect figure-ground organisation (Palmer & Brooks, 2008) and that contextual influences in figure-ground organisation can be gated by perceptual grouping between edges (Brooks & Driver, 2010). In addition to these modern observations, I will also argue that we can describe some classic figure-ground principles (e.g., symmetry, convexity, etc.) using perceptual grouping mechanisms. These results suggest that figure-ground organisation and perceptual grouping have more than a mere association under the umbrella topics of Gestalt psychology and perceptual organisation. Instead, perceptual grouping may provide a mechanism underlying a broad class of new and extant figure-ground principles.