George Mather
News and Profile

Recent publications and other activities

My  recent publications include two books, "The Psychology of Art", and "Foundations of Sensation and Perception", both published by Routledge. Recent research papers investigate topics including the vision science of the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) system, the perception of moving human figures, and the image statistics of Western visual art.

See the Publications section for details of my publications.

Recent presentations include the Geoffrey J Burton Memorial Lecture at the Applied Vision Association Annual Meeting (2021), research seminars at the University of Malta (2022) and University of Bristol (2023), and a presentation at the Visual Science of Art Conference in the Netherlands (2022).

Brief Profile

My academic training is in psychological science (a BA degree from the University of Sheffield and PhD from the University of Reading; Fellow of the Higher Education Academy). After completing a PhD in 1979, my research career began with academic positions at the University of Reading, York University (Canada), and University College London. I was appointed to a New Blood Lectureship at the University of Sussex in 1984. I have held an academic position at Sussex for most of my academic career, becoming a Full Professor in 2000, a Visiting Professor 2011-2014 (while at the University of Lincoln) and an Honorary Professor 2022-on. Following my retirement I also became an Emeritus Professor at the University of Lincoln. In 2023 I was awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship at the University of Sussex, with funding to investigate illusions of visual motion perception (see here for a description).

My research interests in human vision include movement perception, visual after-effects, perceptual factors is sport, and the perception of visual art. PDFs of most of my publications can be found in the Publications section.

Much of my research has been funded by major UK science funding bodies (listed in the Research section). I recently stepped down from the editorial board of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B, and am currently on the editorial board of the journals Perception/iPerception). I am a member of the Experimental Psychology Society and of the Applied Vision Association and an Emeritus Member of the Vision Sciences Society.

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