Perception and Action research

Since 2001, the group has received substantial funding from the Research Councils as well as from a wide range of charities. It has continued to publish its research extensively with, since 2001, 58 journal articles (and 4 book chapters).

Field, supported by the EPSRC, has shown that motor areas of cortex are involved in perceptual judgements of collision, demonstrated a distinction between areas in parietal cortex sensitive to current and future heading direction, and mapped the brain areas involved in steering a course. In behavioural research, he has shown that knowledge of object size plays a role in collision judgments.

Glennerster's group, supported by the Wellcome Trust, Royal Society and Visually Impaired Children Taking Action (VICTA), has developed a new theoretical framework for understanding the visual processing of binocular disparity and optic flow. Using a state-of-the-art immersive virtual reality laboratory, they have shown that standard models of 3D visual reconstruction from stereopsis and motion parallax require re-evaluation. They have made novel proposals about how the visual system represents surface structure, object location and observer heading, in each case without using a fully metric Cartesian coordinate frame.

Harris' group, supported by the EPSRC and Parkinson's Disease Society, has shown that patients with Parkinson's disease make errors in the perception of space, related to the side of worse motor symptoms, which affect patients' judgments of apertures such as doorways; and they are currently investigating their effects on patients' gait (in collaboration with a biomedical engineering and neurology colleagues at Surrey and Reading). With RETF support, using psychophysics and fMRI, they (with ophthalmology colleagues in Reading) are investigating recovery of visual function after retinal surgery, and developing methods for measuring quality of vision from different kinds of implanted intra-ocular lenses.

Ho, supported by the Parkinson's Disease Society, ESRC, HiQ Foundation and European Huntington's Disease Network (in collaboration with neurologists and speech and language therapists at Reading), has shown that patients with Huntington's disease demonstrate exaggerated pseudoneglect in visuospatial processing, and has characterised the specific cognitive impairments in these patients and developed new measures sensitive to decline. She has also determined under which auditory conditions patients with Parkinson's disease can and cannot successfully reprogramme and modulate the volume of their speech output.

McSorley, supported by the EPSRC, has shown that distractors can increase the accuracy of saccades (by increasing latency), and charted the time course of the competitive interactions operating in the neural structures involved in generating saccades.

Watkins' group, supported by the EPSRC and BBSRC with industrial partners Arup, Ecophon and Phonak, has provided the first demonstrations of perceptual constancy in hearing. Having developed state-of-the-art techniques to measure the acoustic properties of rooms and reproduce these in a virtual auditory display, the group is currently elucidating the mechanisms that allow a perceiver to compensate for reverberation in enclosed environments.