Index

What does it mean to “see”? This depends on the organism doing the seeing and on what is being seen and why. Our research starts from the idea that vision is a dynamic process, linking an organism to its environment. In the Vision Lab, experiments with human observers are used to explore the basic processes underlying our perception of, and interaction with, our world. Our main areas of interest are binocular vision and the perception of objects and layout.

Welcome to the Vision Lab in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St Andrews. The lab currently hosts three research groups, led by Julie Harris, Paul Hibbard and Dhanraj Vishwanath based in state of the art laboratories.

We have close links to members of the Perception and Performance Group, and the Perception Lab and the Fife-Tay Vision Group.

We’re also members of the Institute of Behavioural and Neural Science in St Andrews.

Want to join us? Opportunities.

News

January 7th, 2013

Olivier Penacchio has joined the vision lab.

November 2nd, 2012

Louise O’Hare, has passed her viva.

October 1st, 2012

P. George Lovell has gone part-time to take a lectureship at Abertay - congratulations George!

September 10th, 2012

Louise O’Hare, has submitted her PhD thesis.

August 27th, 2012

Andrew MacKenzie Andy MacKenzie will be joining the group in September to start a PhD project on Active and Passive Hazard Perception in a Driving Environment (supervisor Julie Harris).

July 30th, 2012

samanthaofili has started a summer internship on ‘Complex Depth Perception’ under the supervision of Julie Harris

July 18th, 2012

Postdoc position: working with Harris and Lovell on Vision and Camouflage

We have a postdoc position available, starting 1st December 2012 (application deadline 6th September):

June 15th, 2012

peiliu will be starting a summer internship funded by URIP on “Vertical and Horizontal Representations of Time in English and Mandarin Speakers” under the supervision of Julie Harris and Clare Jonas.

June 10th, 2012

Congratulations to Katharina Zeiner on the award of her PhD!

June 1st, 2012

Sandra Quinn was invited to present ‘Time Perception in Audition: temporal processing across the lifespan’ at Approaches to Rhythm and Timing in Scotland Today (ARTiST) at the University of Edinburgh (Funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, June 2012).

May 22nd 2012

Julie Harris, Paul Hibbard and David Hunter attended the joint AVA/BMVA meeting in Cambridge.

May 21st 2012

ruthmaybank has won an award from the summer internship award IBANS to research the link between synaesthesia and migraine.

May 20th, 2012

Sandra Quinn has a paper accepted to be published in the journal The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

May 11-16th, 2012

Julie Harris, P. George Lovell, Dhanraj Vishwanath, Katharina Zeiner, Louise O’Hare, attended the VSS annual meeting in Naples, Florida.

April 17-19th, 2012

Julie Harris, P. George Lovell, Paul Hibbard, Louise O’Hare, attended Predicting Perceptions in Edinburgh.

April 10th, 2012

Sandra Quinn has a paper accepted to be published in the journal Perception

April 6th, 2012

peiliu has been awarded a University Research Internship (URIP) to work in the Vision lab this summer with Clare Jonas and Julie Harris. Her project will be on “Frame of Reference in Vertical and Horizontal Representations of Time in English and Mandarin Speakers”.

March 23rd-25th, 2012

Members of the vision lab took part in the 2012 Scottish Vision Group Conference, March 23rd-25th. http://svg.psy.gla.ac.uk/

March 13th, 2012

Katharina Zeiner submitted her PhD thesis, entitled: On the perception of monocular regions in binocular scenes.

March 10th, 2012

Members of the Vision Lab had a display on binocular vision at the University Science Open Day, as part of Fife Science Festival‘s contribution to National Science and Engineering Week.

February 15, 2012

Predicting Perceptions: the third international conference on appearance.

Registration is now open for this conference, co-organised by Prof. Julie Harris.

This is an interdisciplinary conference with these aims:

1. to include measurement and prediction of perceptions derived from all sensing modalities (not just sight)
2. to widen the range of ‘perceptions’ considered from the established properties of colour, gloss, texture, and translucency to include more emotive considerations such as engagement, perceived worth and quality; and
3. to emphasise that, due to the increasing role played by the Digital Economy, digital media is an important stimuli in its own right.

For more details, see: http://www.perceptions.macs.hw.ac.uk/

February 13, 2012

Christopher Gillespie has been aawarded a scholarship to present a poster at the Workshop on Science of Experiential and Qualitative Spaces - SEQS, in Rovereto (TN) - ITALY

February 1, 2012

Julie Harris, Louise O’Hare, and Stéphane Clery have been invited to speak at the Rank Prize Funds Symposium on Visual Variation, Grasmere, Cumbria, Feb 27th - Mar 1st.

December 1, 2011

Members of the Vision Lab were awarded £4000 from EPSRC Pathways to Impact funding to organise a workshop on the theme of ‘Designing Displays with People in Mind’. The meeting is to take place in the new year. Information will be posted on this website.

November 23, 2011

Julie Harris gave her inaugural lecture to the University, ‘Seeing, in depth’. In the talk she spoke about her fascination with the problems of visual perception and in particular, how we perceive the world in three dimensions using binocular vision.

September 23, 2011

P. George Lovell and Julie Harris were awarded a £400k BBSRC grant (with collaborators Innes Cuthill, Bristol; Graeme Ruxton, Glasgow) to study ‘Counter shaded animal patterns: from photons to form’. This project will start in 2012. Counter-shading is the, extremely widespread, type of coloration where an animal is darker on its back than its belly. Classically, this has been proposed to counteract the normal pattern of illumination (lighter on top) and so obliterate the clues to 3D shape that shadow would normally reveal. But whether other animals perceive shape from shading in the same way we do, and whether this is really what countershaded coloration has evolved to achieve, is largely untested. In this project we will use physical lighting models, real counter-shaded animals and behavioural techniques to address these questions.

September 17, 2011

Julie Harris started her Leverhulme Research Fellowship on ‘The complexity of 3D vision’. In the next two years, she will aim to develop techniques to learn more about how we perceive depth from binocular vision, in complex environments that contain many sources of information about depth.

September 7, 2011

The Beginning and the End of the World: St Andrews, Scandal and the Birth of Photography: The Gateway Galleries in St Andrews has an exhibition on St Andrews and the birth of photography. The exhibition is curated by Prof. Robert Crawford based on a book he recently published which highlights research by Dhanraj Vishwanath. An invitation to the opening on Tuesday 20th September 2011 can be found here.

August 26, 2011

Sandra Quinn has joined the lab as a Visiting Research Fellow. She will be working on projects involving multimodal integration of visual and auditory information.

April 20, 2011

Lucy Spencer has been awarded a Nuffield Foundation Undergraduate Research Bursary to work in Julie Harris’s lab this summer on a project exploring how lighting and shape affect depth perception.

April 19, 2011

Katharina Zeiner has received a Geoffrey J. Burton Memorial Award from the Applied Vision Association (AVA) to attend this year’s VSS meeting in Naples, Florida.

April 3, 2011

Katharina Zeiner and Manuel Spitschan took part in the psignifit programming sprint hosted by the group Modelling of Cognitive Processes at Berlin Institute of Technology.

March 25, 2011

Manuel Spitschan has been accepted to attend the prestigious Undergraduate Summer Program in Computational Neuroscience 2011 at the University of Pennsylvania. Congratulations!

January 30, 2011

The Scottish Vision Group Conference 2011 is scheduled to take placed March 25th-27th, 2011 at Sabhal Mor Ostaig, Sleat, Isle of Skye.

See here for the official website of the Scottish Vision Group.

January 10, 2011

Undergraduate Summer Internships (Summer 2011)

If you currently are a St Andrews student, looking for an undergraduate summer internship, Julie Harris, Dhanraj Vishwanath or Paul Hibbard would be pleased to chat about possibilities. Drop us an email to let us know (contact information can be found on the individual pages).

Note

Various funding organisations offer vacation scholarships; a list can be accessed here.

November 24, 2010

Lab members Louise O’Hare,, Katharina Zeiner and Manuel Spitschan were selected for travel awards from the Applied Vision Association to attend the the AVA Christmas Meeting at Paris, France, December 17-18, 2010.

November 4, 2010

On November 13, 2010, from 10:00 to 15:00, the Vision Lab will be at Science Spectacular!, held at Adam Smith College, St Brycedale Campus, St Brycedale Avenue in Kirkcaldy! Also see: Public Engagement.

September 27, 2010

On October 1 and 2, the Vision Lab will be at Carnegie College, Dunfermline for the Fife Science And Engineering Festival - Open Days with an exciting exhibit! Also see Public Engagement.

September 1, 2010

Launch of the new website: For any comments or remarks, see Contact.