The Perception Group at St. Andrews comprises 6 permanent staff and their associated research groups, working using a broad range of techniques to study perception, from neurophysiology and neural network modelling, through psychophysical and eye movement recording, to behavioural measures marking evolutionary fitness, and responses to emotion and beauty.

The group consists of, Peter Földiák, Mike Oram, Paul Hibbard, David Perrett, D Vishwanath and Julie Harris.

Laboratories and Funding

The group hosts modern, state-of-the-art laboratories in Perception and Vision, and has access to new super-computing facilities for modelling and analysis of large data sets. Research facilities have been recently refurbished and equipped under SRIFII and SRIFIII.

Support for our research comes from a wide range of funding bodies and has included BBSRC, Carnegie Trust, EC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, Royal Society of London and Unilever.

Group members

Peter Földiák	Biological mechanisms and neural network models of sensory information processing in vision and pattern recognition, perceptual adaptation, semantic knowledge representation and artificial intelligence.
Julie Harris	Visual perception, binocular vision, eye movements and gaze patterns, shape and depth perception, binocular distance perception, motion in three dimensions.
Paul Hibbard	Visual perception, statistical properties of binocular disparity, biases in three dimensional space perception, binocular vision for the control of action.
Mike Oram	Temporal aspects of neurophysiological data and how this relates to the processing of visual information, including analysis and modelling methods that allow examination of temporal properties of neurophysiological data.
David Perrett	Recognising facial attributes and understanding actions of others, the nature of cues in the face to attractiveness and health, attraction to voice and to pheromones, cross modal integration in understanding actions.
Dhanraj Vishwanath	3D space and object perception. Surface representation, depth perception, pictorial perception, and the linkage between perception and eye movements.

Opportunities

Research Degrees:
we welcome applications from postgraduate students in the areas detailed above. Please see our postgraduate admissions page for further details.

Postdoctoral:
Short-term postdoctoral positions funded from research grants are advertised regularly and posted here. There are many sources of independent funding for postdoctoral fellowships at St. Andrews, including:

BBSRC,
British Academy,
Carnegie Trust,
EPSRC,
ESRC,
Human Frontiers,
Leverhulme Trust,
MRC,
Nuffield Foundation,
Royal Society of Edinburgh,
Royal Society of London.

If you think you are eligible for any of the above, and interested in working with our group, contact one of the members of staff above.

Visitors:
St. Andrews is a vibrant University in a beautiful setting on the east coast of Scotland. We welcome visiting researchers via sabbatical or other routes.