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 a presentation at the Visual Science of Art Conference in the Netherlands (2022) a seminar at University of Bristol (2023), and a poster presentation at Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting in the USA (2024) in collaboration with Patrick Cavanagh. I will be presenting a poster at the forthcoming European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP) in Aberbeen.
Brief Profile
My academic training is in psychological science (a BA degree from the University of Sheffield and PhD from the University of Reading). After completing my 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 since then, becoming a Full Professor in 2000, a Visiting Professor 2011-2014 and an Honorary Professor 2022-on. I was a Full Professor at the University of Lincoln from 2011 to 2022, where I became an Emeritus Professor upon my retirement. 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.