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Education
Ph.D., University of Toronto, 2001
Research Interests
One of the most important abilities we possess is our capacity to detect,
discriminate and identify objects in our environment. It is difficult to
imagine navigating through the world without the ability to reliably detect
objects in our path; or having social interactions without the ability to
recognize other people's faces. These are tasks that we perform with ease
and on a continual basis every day. But how does our visual system
translate the array of light that reaches our eyes into an organized
representation of meaningful objects embedded within complex scenes? My
research is directed towards understanding some of these processes that are
performed on visual patterns after the initial stages of sensory encoding.
I am particularly interested in understanding what it is that limits our
ability to use the information that is available to us when we are trying to
detect or recognize visual patterns. My approach typically involves the use
of a variety of psychophysical and signal-processing methods (such as ideal
observer analysis and signal detection theory) to quantitatively
characterize the mechanisms involved in various perceptual processes, such
as perceptual learning, visual completion, face recognition and visual
memory decay.
Representative Publications
The following selection of representative publications is listed in inverse chronological order:
Gold, J.M., Murray, R.F., Bennett, P.J. & Sekuler, A.B. (2000). Deriving
behavioral receptive fields for visually completed contours.
Current Biology (10), 663-666.
Gold, J., Bennett, P.J. & Sekuler, A.B. (1999). Signal but not noise changes
with perceptual learning.
Nature (402), 176-178.
Gold, J.M., Bennett, P.J. & Sekuler, A.B. (1999). Identification of
band-pass filtered faces and letters by human and ideal observers.
Vision Research (39), 3537-3560.
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