Vision and Perception

The critical role of time perception in our internal and external lives is perhaps best supported by the observations that there is no clinical condition characterized solely by a selective impairment of this ability, and that there is no single brain lesion resulting in a loss of timing abilities, as if a complete loss of a sense of time was either incompatible with life or readily counterbalanced by a takeover of this function by other brain mechanisms. I will review evidence from experimental psychology and neurosciences on how our brain can “tell the time” without explicit clocks. 

Vision is the sensory ‘glue’ which often binds other senses together. It is also commonly affected following brain injury, however understanding of its recovery and rehabilitation remains in its infancy. This talk will give an overview of how vision can be affected in brain injury and provide an insight into the various types of therapy and rehabilitation which can be used to help. A selection of case examples will also be presented to show these in application. 

Whenever we see a face, it takes us less than a second to extract a considerable amount of information about it. This observation poses a question: do we process faces in a fundamentally different way than other objects? In this talk I will discuss what we know about face-related processing from experimental psychology and neuroscience, and which open questions still remain.