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Visual Perception Laboratory

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Robert Patterson

Contact Information:
Email: rpatter@mail.wsu.edu
Office: Johnson Tower 314
Phone: (509) 335-8427

 

Website:

Lab website

Summary:

Our laboratory investigates the ability of humans to sense and perceive visual information. Our research is informed and motivated by recent advances in the field of visual neuroscience. For example, in our lab we study how individuals perceive motion and how they perceive binocular depth information (called "stereopsis"). These two areas of research, motion and depth perception, have developed over the years as basically separate lines of inquiry. However, in our lab we examine motion and depth perception within a single paradigm. We generate and display on a computer monitor three-dimensional dynamic stimuli (called dynamic random-dot stereograms) that can be perceived only with binocular vision. These 3-D stimuli undergo movement and we determine how well observers perceive the depth and motion of the stimuli (e.g., we may ask the observer to discriminate the speed and/or direction of the moving 3-D stimulus). Our results reveal that the motion pathway in the visual system also processes binocular depth information, which adds complexity to our conceptualization of the motion system. Generally, this kind of research is important from both a basic research perspective and from an applied research perspective.