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Margaret Sereno Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology,    Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences B.A., 1983, Northern Illinois Ph.D., 1989, Brown Research Interests Construction and testing of neurally based model of perceptual processes. Email

I am building partially prespecified multistage models of the visual system in which response properties of higher stages develop as the model ³learns from experience.² Like developing biological systems, such structured learning systems can extract environmental regularities by combining information from lower levels to represent complex and abstract properties of the input array and, in so doing, reveal features of the environment represented at intermediate and higher-level stages of sensory processing.

One of my projects has focused on neural models of motion perception: determining large scale object motion from spatially localized motion signals. These models have made counter intuitive predictions about the perception of the speed and direction of simple patterns and the anatomical basis of position-invariant responses to rotation and dilation in the visual system.

Another project focuses on the effects of two-dimensional motion contrast on the interpretation of three-dimensional depth from motion. My long range goals consist of examining‹from a psychological and neurobiological perspective‹the interaction of motion, depth, form, and color in the perception of three-dimensional objects and the segregation of figure from ground.

Representative Publications