Alex O. Holcombe, PhD

Senior Lecturer, School of Psychology University of Sydney Brennan MacCallum Bldg (A18) Sydney NSW 2006, Australia office: +61 2 9351 2883 alexh at psych.usyd.edu.au bio

In my lab, we're curious about temporal aspects of human visual information processing - how quickly do different cortical modules and stages process information, and how are they coordinated in time? We use behavioral experiments, illustrated by the animations below, to compare speed limits for different features and the dynamics of how these features are bound into a coherent percept. One coordination problem occurs because when an object moves across the visual field, it stimulates different populations of neurons in early visual cortex, so we're testing how the signals from different areas are combined by later stages of the brain. Overall, fast processes somehow work together with others that are very sluggish in order to yield conscious perception. Recently, we've begun experiments to see how these limitations constrain our attempts to interact with moving objects.

Published research Course material

Animations of perceptual phenomena
	Breaking crowding Color-motion asynchrony eliminated Binding at a global stage Global form binding Two speeds for binding color&shape Binding words Temporal transparency Wakes&spokes brightness illusions Midstream order deficit