Topic: human psychophysics

Investigate how eye movements shape perception with Martina Poletti and Michele Rucci at the University of Rochester. Research spans spatial representations, foveal and peripheral processing, attention, retinal anatomy, emmetropization and myopia. The laboratory combines human psychophysics, controlled retinal stimulation, computational modelling, precise eye and head tracking, retinal imaging and EEG during active vision. Researchers work within the Center for Visual Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, with collaborations in optics, neuroscience and ophthalmology. Applications comprise

To survive in the uncertain world, humans and animals must pick the right task to perform in each situation and flexibly switch between tasks when they infer that the environment has changed. Yet such flexibility comes at a cost. Task performance decreases when the relevance of the task is uncertain. Here we present multiple lines of evidence from monkey electrophysiology, human psychophysics, and artificial neural networks demonstrating a neuronal mechanism that inflicts a cost of flexibility. In a behavioral paradigm designed to measure and manipulate subjects’ belief about the relevance of