Research Expertise and Interest
cognitive neuroscience, cognition, attention, visual perception, vision, visually guided action, human factors
Research Description
The Whitney Lab investigates visual perception, attention, and visually guided action. Specific areas of interest include motion perception, perceptual localization, object and face recognition, scene perception, and visuomotor behavior. Using a variety of techniques, including psychophysics, functional neuroimaging, and transcranial magnetic stimulation, they study visual and visuomotor function, with the goal of understanding the perceptual, cognitive, and neural mechanisms that allow humans to perceive and interact with objects in a dynamic world.
In the News
Like Our Social Media Feeds, Our Brains Take a Little While to Update
Face it. Our faces don’t always reveal our true emotions
Why the lights don’t dim when we blink
Scientists pinpoint how we miss subtle visual changes, and why it keeps us sane
Vision scientists at UC Berkeley and MIT have discovered an upside to the brain mechanism that can blind us to subtle visual changes in the movies and in the real world.
‘Nuff said: Humans get the gist of complex sounds
New research by neuroscientists at UC Berkeley, suggests that the human brain is not detail-oriented, but opts for the big picture when it comes to hearing.