Prof. Anya Hurlbert
Director of Institute of Neuroscience
- Email: Anya.Hurlbert@ncl.ac.uk
- Telephone: +44 (0) 191 222 7638
- Fax: +44-191-222-5622
- Website: http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/anya.hurlbert
- Address: Henry Wellcome Building for Neuroecology
Framlington Place
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
NE2 4HH
ION
Research Interests
My research focuses on human visual perception: how and why do we see what we see? I am interested in studying vision fundamentally as a window onto the human brain, and believe that understanding how we see will ultimately tell us how much of the brain works. My main interest is in how we perceive colours of objects, and how the colours we see interact with objects’ shape, texture, motion and other attributes to influence how we recognise objects.
One of my main research interests is colour constancy: a fundamental phenomenon which ensures that the object colours we see tend to stay the same despite changes in lighting conditions which cause changes in the light reflected from objects. My research asks: How good is colour constancy in the natural world? What are the underlying mechanisms in the eye and brain that achieve colour constancy? Does colour constancy in fact improve object recognition?
I am also interested in other phenomena of colour perception -- colour contrast, colour assimilation, colour discrimination, colour memory and colour preference, for example – and in the underlying neural mechanisms of colour vision from eye to brain, and how they change as we age.
Other Expertise
Other main research interests: visual attention, cross-modal interactions (between vision and hearing), and the cross-fertilisation between art and science.
Research techniques include: psychophysics, computational modelling, cellular neurophysiology, human brain imaging (EEG and MEG) and neuropsychology.
Current Work
§ Basic mechanisms underlying chromatic contrast and chromatic assimilation.
§ Sex differences in colour preference.
§ The role of object recognition in colour constancy.
§ Colour perception and reproduction in natural images.
§ The perception of chromatic gradients and mutual reflections.
§ Auditory-visual interactions in motion perception.
§ The role of specular highlights in colour and shape perception.
§ Attentional modulation of colour appearance.
§ Age-related changes in visual attention and colour perception.
See my web page (address above) for relevant pdfs.
Selected Publications
- Ling Y; Hurlbert A. Role of color memory in successive color constancy. Journal of the Optical Society of America A: Optics and Image Science, and Vision 2008, 25(6), 1215-1226.
- Ruppertsberg AI; Bloj M; Hurlbert A. Sensitivity to luminance and chromaticity gradients in a complex scene. Journal of Vision 2008, 8(9), 1-16.
- Hurlbert AC; Ling Y. Biological components of sex differences in color preference. Current Biology 2007, 17(16), R623-R625.
- Hurlbert A. Colour constancy. Current Biology 2007, 17(21), R906-R907.
- Ling, Y,; Hurlbert, A.C.; Robinson L. Sex differences in colour preference. In: Pitchford, N.J.; Biggam C.P, ed. Progress in Colour Studies 2: Cognition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006, pp. TBC.
- Aspell, J.E.; Tanskanen, T.; Hurlbert, A.C. Neuromagnetic correlates of visual motion coherence. European Journal of Neuroscience 2005, 22(11), 2937-2945.
Background
I graduated from Princeton University in 1980 with a BA in Physics, followed in 1981 by a Part III Diploma in Theoretical Physics and in 1982 by an MA in Physiology from Cambridge University, where I held a Marshall Scholarship. In 1989, I received a PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT, where I studied with Tomaso Poggio and Peter Schiller, and in 1990, an MD from Harvard Medical School. I then held a Vision Research Fellowship at Oxford University in Andrew Parker’s lab, before joining Physiological Sciences in the Medical School at Newcastle University in 1991 as a lecturer. I’m now Professor of Visual Neuroscience and Director of the Institute of Neuroscience.
