John Philbeck

        

My research investigates the psychological and neural processes underlying how we use vision to determine where we are, and how we remain oriented while moving about.  To study these issues, I test the perceptual abilities of people from a wide range of ages, including individuals who have suffered certain forms of brain injury.  I am especially interested in how the brain constructs representations of object distances at very brief time-scales.  Our ability to take in information rapidly can get slowed down by a variety of real-world factors, from fast-moving, high-workload environments to normal aging.  I study the impact of these factors on how we localize objects and how our visual system flexibly compensates for these slow-downs.