I’m interested in visual perception, in particular motion perception and face perception. I’ve also recently developed an interest in applying psychophysical methods to areas of research in which such techniques have not widely been used. In terms of motion perception I’ve spent much of my career looking at the hierarchical organisation of motion processing mechanism – in other words, what types of mechanisms do we need to account for our perception of motion over a wide variety of stimuli. Much of my current motion work tries to tease apart the contributions and interactions involved in the processing of local and global motion. In face perception I’ve been looking at face adaptation, specifically using face adaptation to investigate the nature of our underlying representation of facial identity and facial expression.

Recent and current grants

• 2011 ESRC: The visual representation of facial expression and facial identity. £80,878
• 2007 EPSRC & DSTL (Defense Science and Technology Laboratory): Natural dynamic scenes and human vision. £313,391 – with Tom Troscianko (PI) & Iain Gilchrist.
• 2007 Alcohol Education & Research Council: Are you looking at me II? Effects of alcohol consumption on the processing of perceptual cues of emotional expression. £41,970 – with Marcus Munafo (PI) and Ian Penton-Voak.
• 2006 Alcohol Education & Research Council: Effects of alcohol consumption on processing of perceptual cues of emotional expressions. £4,530 – with Marcus Munafo (PI) and Ian Penton-Voak.
• 2005 EPSRC: Understanding biological motion using moving light displays. £354,778 – with Neill Campbell (PI) and Nick Scott-Samuel.
• 2005 The British Academy: Testing for viewpoint dependence in the encoding of facial expressions. £7,128 – with Stavri Nikolov.
• 2005 The Nuffield Foundation: Do the cerebral hemispheres contribute differently to body image and its disturbances? £5,780 – with Dr Christine Mohr (PI).
• 2004 Wellcome Trust Vacation Scholarship: Adaptive Mechanisms for the Encoding of Facial Expression. £1,280
• 2003 DTC Postgraduate Studentship: Fusing Motion Information with Static images. £54,000 – with Dr Nick Scott-Samuel and Stavri Nikolov.