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. Recently, we've begun experiments to see how temporal limits constrain our perception of the position of moving objects.

Published research Lab wiki 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 Twinkle aftereffect Wakes&spokes brightness illusions Midstream order deficit

I serve as section editor,
Psychology, for PLoS ONE

This cartoon summary of temporal limits on visual percepts appears in Trends in Cognitive Science, 13(5):216-21.