Curtis Baker

My lab's research is aimed at the long-term objective of understanding human visual perception, particularly low-level neural mechanisms that are functionally relevant in everyday life. Natural scenes in our visual world are filled with objects delineated from their backgrounds not only by simple changes in luminance or colour, but also by differences in other attributes such as contrast, texture, or motion.  An important goal is to understand how early visual processing detects and utilizes these rich cues to provide a robust perception of "figure-ground" and local depth relationships in the real world. Towards this end, we employ computational modeling, particularly machine learning methods, with single unit neurophysiology in the visual cortex.