Colin John Palmer

When interacting with others, we effortlessly ‘read’ information in their appearance and behaviour, such as their identity, their emotional state, and their focus of attention. How does our brain extract and encode this information? I approach this question using visual psychophysics, computational modelling and 3D-graphical rendering, seeking to build upon our knowledge of how the visual system extracts the most basic elements of our environment (e.g., colour, shape, and motion) and develop a similarly mechanistic understanding of how our experience of the social world arises from sensory processes. A clinical application of this research is to understand how systematic differences in the way that the brain processes sensory information may contribute to sensory and social difficulties in conditions like autism, schizophrenia and face prosopagnosia.