Leslie Welch
Associate Professor |
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INFORMATION |
| Office | Hunter Lab room 363
Department of Psychology
(401)863-3294
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| Email | Leslie_Welch@brown.edu
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| INTERESTS |
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My research is concerned with visual information processing, that is, discovering what information is
available to the visual system and what parts of that information are actually used. These psychophysical
experiments are carried out on adult humans. In my experiments, observers usually are trained to perform
their best by giving them feedback and practice to help them learn a task. This best performance can be
compared across tasks in order to assess what information is actually used to do a specific discrimination
or detection. |
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I am especially interested in how we perceive the speed and direction of objects in motion. My
approach to studying motion perception includes trying to discover the motion system's limitations
and determining what those limitations can tell us about how the system works. I am also interested
in how we determine the relative position of objects in dept and how differences in relative depth
can influence what shapes observers see. These different kinds of information (among many others)
are integrated by the visual system to form a unified perception of the world, since we do not
perceive motion information as distinct from position information for the same object. Interactions
between the different processes can tell us how the different types of information are combined. |
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The goal of my research is to discover the mechanisms the brain uses to solve perceptual problems.
The visual system is a convenient system to work with because the input can be defined very precisely.
There is also a large community, especially at Brown, working on the visual system including
scientists in psychophysics, physiology and computational modelling. |
