Zoltan attended the 2013 Technical Meeting of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, where he presented a paper on his MRes project. This is a nice photo of him (fifth from left / youngest person present). He’s collecting an award for a 2012 paper in Motion Imaging on which I was an author; none of us 4 authors could make it (shame; I would have made it not a totally woman-free zone!)
Colleague Andrew Trevelyan has just created 18-minute film based on the event he organised for the British Science Festival last year.
The last programming language I learnt was Matlab, back circa 1994. Eek, that is twenty years ago now! It seems a shame that today there are all these amazing electronic devices, but coding is so much less accessible than when I was a wee lass learning to program my ZX Spectrum in BASIC. So I have been trying to “get with the program” a bit by learning some Android. I followed a couple of the tutorials on http://developer.android.com/training/basics/firstapp/index.html, but found it hard going, although I did successfully code up a 2D dynamic random dot pattern. Then Brad Pearce pointed me to Game Maker Studio, which offers a very simple drag-and-drop interface for building games, supported by code as necessary. So I’ve spent an entertaining few hours trying to get to grips with that. It has a good set of tutorials but I was too impatient to follow them for long and have now dived off-piste trying to code up my own game. It’s hard going learning something new isn’t it! I bet all the students who I’ve sternly instructed to “learn Matlab” over the years can relate to that :).
My mantis Dream Team is now complete with the arrival of Ronny Rosner this week. Ronny is busy setting up our insect electrophysiology lab. I’m delighted to have such an experienced neurophysiologist on board, and am excited to see what new insights he will produce about mantis visual processing.
From The Guardian: Advice on writing academic CVs.
I was just assembling a (personal, biased) reading list on neuronal models of motion sensitivity, and it occurred to me it might be good to do it publicly as a blog post. Please any neuro readers, chip in with your own contributions!
Landy & Movshon (eds), Computational models of visual processing
Russell & Karen DeValois, Spatial Vision
Zanker, J., Modeling human motion perception. I. Classical stimuli. Naturwissenschaften, 1994. 81(4): p. 156-63.
I think this might be a good place to start – what do you reckon?
roughly corresponding to V1 in my mind.
Adelson, E.H. and J.R. Bergen, Spatiotemporal energy models for the perception of motion. J Opt Soc Am [A], 1985. 2(2): p. 284-99.
Poss my all-time fave in the genre. So clear and logical.
Watson, A.B. and A.J. Ahumada, Jr., Model of human visual-motion sensing. J Opt Soc Am A, 1985. 2(2): p. 322-41.
van Santen, J.P. and G. Sperling, Temporal covariance model of human motion perception. J Opt Soc Am [A], 1984. 1(5): p. 451-73.
van Santen, J.P. and G. Sperling, Elaborated Reichardt detectors. J Opt Soc Am A, 1985. 2(2): p. 300-21.
Three more classics.
Perceptual consequences of this sort of motion sensor:
Sheliga, B.M., et al., Initial ocular following in humans: a response to first-order motion energy. Vision Res, 2005. 45(25-26): p. 3307-21.
Such a nice demo with the missing-fundamental stimulus.
Serrano-Pedraza, I., G. P., and A. Derrington, Evidence for reciprocal antagonism between motion sensors tuned to coarse and fine features. Journal of Vision, 2007. 7(12): p. 8 1-14.
Intriguing result and nice clear modelling
Heeger, D.J., E.P. Simoncelli, and J.A. Movshon, Computational models of cortical visual processing. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 1996. 93: p. 623-627.
Getting into the difference between V1 and MT, pattern vs component motion etc
Perrone, J.A. and A. Thiele, Speed skills: measuring the visual speed analyzing properties of primate MT neurons. Nat Neurosci, 2001. 4(5): p. 526-32.
How do you get a neuron tuned to speed from neurons tuned to spatial and temporal frequency?
Honda has made a car advert featuring a whole host of visual illusions, mainly based on anamorphic perspective. Love it! There’s also a Making-of video.
I’m no geneticist, but I was interested to see the recent comments on the heritability of academic performance. I thought it demonstrated the sorry lack of understanding of these things in the media and general public (including me), and I was disappointed in the quality of the debate.
A government advisor, Dominic Cummings, wrote a report in the course of which he stated that “70% of cognitive capacity is genetic, beside which the quality of teaching pales into insignificance”. This got a lot of comment, e.e.g from Polly Toynbee in the Guardian. Toynbee does make clear that she doesn’t understand genetics, and seeks advice from genetics Prof Steve Jones. I eagerly heard a discussion of this on the BBC Radio 4 programme “Inside Science” between Profs Jones and Plomin, hoping they would give a clear explanation of what exactly heritability is which would help people like me.
For example, Toynbee says at one point, “Wealth is considerably more heritable than genes”. This is obvious true in an everyday interpretation of the word – you can will your millions to your children, but you can’t guarantee they’ll inherit your striking red hair. But in the scientific definition of the word, nothing is more heritable than genes. I felt this demonstrated the confusion, and this is where we really needed a nice BBC science programme to go into these issues.
Despite the august guests, I felt they didn’t really rise to the occasion. I’m no expert, but I find it helpful to realise that when we talk about heritability, we’re not talking about a fixed quantity, like the mass of the electron. It depends on the context. It may be 70% in Britain now, but it might have been 20% in the past and 90% in Finland. If you just consider one school where the kids come from similar backgrounds, the heritability may be close to 100% – there are bright kids and dimmer kids even within the same family, and it’s just how they are. But if you look between schools, comparing privileged vs deprived kids, you might find the variation between kids in each group is swamped by the large difference between the groups, indicating almost no heritability and an overwhelming effect of the environment.
The closest the discussion got to this was a throw-away comment by Steve Jones: “If everyone stopped smoking, lung cancer would be a genetic disease”. I thought this was an important point which should have been pursued: if we could arrange things so that every child could get the best possible education to enable them to achieve their potential, academic performance would be 100% genetic.
Finally,as far as I remember, no one stated that heritability has nothing to say about the importance of teaching quality, class size, resources and so on. If we find academic performance is 100% genetic, that indicates variation in these factors is not affecting results: children are receiving the same opportunities. But they may not be receiving the best opportunities.
As I said above, I’m not a geneticist, so I’d welcome any correction if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick anywhere in the above…
Things are going well with the mantids. They are such great experimental subjects; I think I prefer them to humans! Certainly a lot less hassle :).
Although the main thrust of the M3 project will be about their stereo vision, we are getting increasingly excited about the great questions we can ask about their motion perception. Lisa is currently collecting data on a motion perception question, while Vivek is progressing the main stereo research arc by constructing ever more refined 3D glasses for the mantids. Ghaith is working on stimulus generation for both projects and starting to develop models of the underlying algorithms. Exciting times.
I was pleased David Hubel was honoured by an obituary in The Telegraph, but I was surprised by the opening sentence: “When Hubel and Wiesel began experiments on vision and the brain in the late 1950s, neuroscientists thought that images from the retina were transmitted to visual centres in the brain, and projected onto the cerebral cortex in the same way as a photograph on to film.” Surely this underestimates 1950s neuroscience??