Perception is the process by which sensory cues are integrated to form a model of the world. Participating faculty come from Psychology, Computer Science, Philosophy, Biomedical Engineering, and the Biomedical and Health Sciences. Key research topics include computer vision, human psychophysics, visuomotor integration, philosophy of perception, and neuroscience. Collaborations among faculty and student researchers across this diverse array of topics and disciplines have contributed to the emergence of novel approaches, as well as to the formation of a stable and interactive community of perceptual scientists.
The interdisciplinary Perceptual Science Group was formally formed in 2006 with the support of an Integrative Graduate Education and Training Program (IGERT) from the National Science Foundation. The program supported more than 40 trainees, with graduates going on to careers in academics and industry. Perceptual Science integrates computational modeling and experiments across Psychology and Computer Science. It remains a major component of research and training at RuCCS, with frequent seminars and colloquia, as well as our annual Perceptual and Cognitive Science Forum.
Students are encouraged to take advantage of the opportunities to gain foundational training in both Computer Science and Psychology, and to embark on collaborative research across other areas. Opportunities are available for interdisciplinary team projects with fellow students by taking the novel course Integrative Methods in Perceptual Science, developed with support from NSF.
Affiliated Faculty
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Ahmed Elgammal
Computer Vision and Machine Learning; statistical models for learning visual manifolds of objects; computational models for recognition of articulated objects; computational art history.
Email:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Personal Website | The Art and Artificial Intelligence Lab Website
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Brian McLaughlin
The nature of cognitive architecture, including the connectionism/classicism debate; psychosemantics and the theory of meaning for mental representations.
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Casimir Kulikowski
Image interpretation using planning and learning techniques; methods of theory formation for classification, configuration, planning and design problems with biomedical applications.
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David Margolis
Sensory processing, decision-making, and neural plasticity in mice. Record and manipulate specific neurons and neural circuits as mice perform learned tactile behaviors to understand sensory-guided decision-making from the synaptic to the network levels. We are also interested in how brain injury and neurological disorders impact neuronal activity and behavior.
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David Vicario
Neuroethology. Using behavioral, neurophysiological, and anatomical methods in songbirds to study sensory and motor processes that subserve vocal learning, including auditory memory, perception, and production of learned vocalizations.
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David Zald
RBHS/Brain Health Institute
Affective neuroscience, the interaction of emotion with attention and decision-making, and the neural substrates of these functions in both health and neuropsychiatric illness.
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Dimitris Metaxas
American Sign Language and Gesture recognition from video, human identification and intent recognition from video, human computer interaction, shape and motion representation for recognition.
Computational Biomedicine Imaging and Modeling Center Website
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Eileen Kowler
Study of the sensory cues, spatial representations and cognitive factors that guide patterns of smooth and saccadic eye.
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Elizabeth Torres
My interest lies in the study of voluntary actions in general and the emergence of symbolic intelligence from them. In particular, I have been studying natural voluntary arm movements in the context of reaching for and grasping an object, obstacle avoidance, the acquisition and retrieval of a motor program, and more recently on the performance of a parietal patient and of patients with Parkinson's disease. I am also doing research on autism.
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Frances Egan
Philosophy of mind and psychology, the epistemology of science and the explanatory role of representational content in computational psychology.
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Gandalf Nicolas
Application of natural language processing and facial recognition models to the study of social cognition (stereotypes, psychological intersectionality, first impressions); social biases in machine learning.
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Jacob Feldman
Formal, computational and empirical studies of categorization, shape representation, grouping and perceptual inference in visual perception.
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Jenny Wang
Jenny Wang investigates the origins of our knowledge, how we master complicated concepts (such as mathematics), and how we learn about the world around us.
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John P. McGann
Professor/RuCCS Faculty Director
Research in my laboratory employs neurophsyiological, behavioral, and theoretical methods to explore how humans and rodent models learn information about the world and apply this knowledge to the neural processing of incoming sensory stimuli. We are also interested in how dysfunction in these processes could manifest in mental and neurological disorders.
Email:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The McGann Laboratory on the Neurobiology of Sensory Cognition Website
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Kasia M. Bieszczad
Neurobiology of learning and memory. Applies epigenetic, molecular, and electrophysiological techniques in animals to understand the basis of associative learning and memory determined by behavior; combines sensory neurophysiology (in the auditory system) with behavioral neuroscience to study how memory and perception intertwine.
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Kelvin Y. Kwan
Molecular mechanisms underlying sensory and cognitive function in mouse models of human diseases. The lab is interested in understanding how mutations in chromatin remodeling proteins results in hyperactivity and circling behavior in mutant mice. Identifying transcriptome changes in affected neurons by deep sequencing will help us understand how the activity and development of these neurons have been altered. Our goal is to bridge the molecular changes in neurons to the abnormal behavior observed in these mouse models.
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Konstantinos Michmizos
Basic Research: Computational Modeling of Sensorimotor Behavior, Psychophysics, Functional Neuroimaging
Applied research: Rehabilitation Games for children with disabilities, Robotic Neurorehabilitation
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Kostas Bekris
Motion and task planning for autonomous robots; Integration of perception and planning for manipulating and interacting with the physical world; Coordination of multiple physical agents, including human-robot interaction.
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Lee Jussim
Social perception, stereotypes and prejudice, science reform, applied philosophy of science.
Personal Website | Blog Website | Social Perception Lab
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Louis Sass
Philosophy and psychopathology (especially disorders of self); phenomenological philosophy; Wittgenstein; philosophical aspects of psychoanalysis.
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Manish Singh
Formal and empirical study of visual object and surface representations. Part-based description of object shape; Computation of surface structure under partial occlusion and transparency; Visual attention.
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Melchi Michel
Study of visual search and saccadic eye movements, short-term visual memory, perceptual learning and cue integration. Formal computational and ideal observer modeling of visual tasks and of population coding in visual cortex
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Shana Cole
Social cognitive and perceptual processes involved in successful goal pursuit; self-regulation and self-control.
Regulation, Action, and Motivated Perception (RAMP) Lab
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Susanna Schellenberg
Perceptual content and mental content more generally, attention, perceptual evidence, the relationship between the phenomenological and epistemological role of perceptual experience, the situation-dependency of perceptual experience, imagination, mental capacities.
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Terry Wilson
Behavior therapy; social learning theory; treatment of eating disorders.
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Tomas Sjöström
Interested in Decision Theory, Game Theory and Neuroeconomics.
Center for Economic Behavior, Institutions and Design (CEBID) Website
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Victoria Abraira
Trying to understand the cellular and synaptic substrates underlying innocuous touch perception by elucidating the functional organization of sensory neurons in mouse hairy skin and uncovering the neural codes of touch perception in the spinal cord dorsal horn.
Abraira Lab Website Lab Website
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Vladimir Pavlovic
Vladimir's research interests include Bayesian system modeling, time-series analysis, and statistical computer vision. More recently, his research has focused on modeling of human emotions and affect, as well as design of fast, robust, face tracking and identification systems. He is also interested in modeling and analysis of human crowd behavior from the perspective of distributed sensing and decision making systems.
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