Position: Associate Professor

Office: Rm 506, Griffith Taylor Building

Ph: +61 2 9351 2873
Fax: +61 2 9351 2603
Email: davida
(Postfix email address with: @psych.usyd.edu.au)

Postal Address:
School of Psychology
Brennan MacCallum Building (A18)
The University of Sydney
NSW 2006
Australia

Research Interests

A major research interest is cross-modal perception, specifically audio-visual. How does the brain combine sensory information from audition and vision? The primary approach is through human psychophysical experiments which measure aspects of an observer’s perception of sounds, images or combinations of both. Our research may focus on spatial aspects (e.g., localisation of events) or on temporal aspects (e.g, timing and order judgments). From these measurements, inferences are drawn as to how the brain processes audiovisual sensory information to give rise to multimodal perception.

The lab also conducts research into unisensory perception, either auditory or visual. Auditory research is done in close collaboration with Assoc. Professor Carlile’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory in the School of Medical Sciences, allowing access to sophisticated auditory stimuli and signal processing, and to a large anechoic chamber allowing auditory work to be done in the 'free field'. Alternatively, we use the Carlile lab's sophisticated virtual auditory space (VAS) technology to explore auditory perception with virtual sound.

Other research in the lab focuses purely on visual processes. A major interest addresses how the brain resolves visual conflict between the eyes, as when the eyes receive different images. Interocular conflict gives rise to 'binocular rivalry' in which the brain's conscious state alternates between perceiving the image in one eye and perceiving the image in the other eye. An overview of the state of this burgeoning field can be found in a recent book by David Alais and Randolph Blake: "Binocular Rivalry", MIT Press (2005).

Further work in visual perception explores how motion and temporal modulation is encoded by the visual system. We are currently developing new ideas on how 'temporal filters' function in human vision to encode the temporal dimension of visual input. This work is now being extended to an analysis of temporal filtering in natural image sequences (i.e., movies), while other work is looking at the possible role of streak signals left by fast moving images in enhancing motion direction perception.