Bart Anderson

Associate Professor of Vision Science

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Comments or questions? Send me email: bart@psyche.mit.edu

Research interests

 

Research in our lab is directed toward understanding why the world looks the way it does. This involves understanding both the nature of the physical world, and how our visual system creates visual experience. In order to recover the properties of the world from the images in our two eyes, the visual system must somehow separate the different physical factors that operate collectively to determine how much and what kind of light projects to our eyes. The orientation, lightness, color, opacity, and depth of a surface, as well as the direction, number, and color of the light sources, all contribute to the amount of light reaching our eyes, yet the visual system seems to effortlessly separate the images into these different factors. How does the visual system accomplish this seemingly impossible task? This question is the primary question studied in our laboratory. Our laboratory employs phenomenological, psychophysical, and computational methods to critically evaluate and develop theories of perceptual organization.

Our recent work has focused on understanding three fundamental aspects of visual processing. One major area of research involves understanding how the visual system extracts information from multiple views in reconstructing scene geometry. These multiple views can either be simultaneously present in the two eyes (as in stereopsis), and/or successively present in moving image sequences. More specifically, we have been particularly interested in how occluding contours are synthesized in stereopsis and motion perception. This work has led to the discovery of a new class of contour mechanisms, some dramatic new forms of illusory contours, and a new quantitative model of contour synthesis.

A second and related research topic is understanding how the visual system decomposes image regions into multiple "layers" when viewing objects through through transparent or semi-transparent media. During the past few years, we have uncovered a new class of phenomena which reveal the comptuational principles used by the human brain to attribute properties of depth, lightness, and surface opacity to stereoscopic images. This has led to a general theory of stereoscopic surface perception, which is currently being intensively investigated and generalized into new domains.

The broad goal of our research is to uncover the computational principles and the cognitive/neural mechanisms that are responsible for our perceptual experience, and how this shapes and is shaped by our cognitive abilities.

Education

 

Ph.D., Experimental Psychology, Vanderbilt University, 1990

B.A., Psychology, University of Connecticut, 1982

 

Cool Vision Demos

(If you need a PDF file reader, go here and download Acrobat Reader 3.0).
Note that some of the files available to download below are pre-print versions of the published manuscripts, so refer to the published versions for the final form.)

Selected Publications

Anderson, B.L. (in press ) The role of occlusion in the perception of depth, lightness, and opacity. To appear in Psychological Review.

Anderson, B.L. (accepted pending revisions) The role of perceptual organization in White's illusion. To appear in Perception.

Singh, M., and Anderson, B.L. (2002) Perceptual assignment of opacity to translucent surfaces: The role of image blur. Perception, 31, 531-552.

Anderson, B.L., Singh, M., and Fleming, R. (2002) The interpolation of object and surface structure. Cognitive Psychology, 44, 148-190.pdf

Singh, M., and Anderson, B.L. (2002) Toward a perceptual theory of transparency. Psychological Review, 109, 492-519.

van Ee, R., Anderson, B.L, and Farid, H. (2001) Occlusion junctions do not improve stereoacuity. Spatial Vision, 15, 45-59.

Anderson, B.L. (2001) Contrasting theories of White's illusion. Perception, 30, 1499-1501.

van Ee, R., and Anderson, B.L. (2001) Motion direction, speed, and orientation in binocular matching. Nature, 410, 690-694. pdf

Anderson, B.L. (1999) Stereoscopic surface perception. Neuron, 24, 991-928. pdf

Anderson, B.L., & Barth, H.C. (1999) Motion based mechanisms of illusory contour synthesis. Neuron, 24, 433-441. pdf

Anderson, B.L. (1999) Plaids in perspective. Nature, 401, 342. pdf

Malik, J., Anderson, B.L. & Charowhas, C.E. (1999) Stereoscopic occlusion junctions. Nature Neuroscience, 2, 840-843. pdf

Anderson, B.L. (1999) Stereoscopic occlusion and the aperture problem for motion: A new solution. Vision Research, 39, 1273-1284.

Anderson, B.L. (1998) Stereovision: Beyond disparity computations. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2, 222-228.

Anderson, B. L. (1997) A Theory of Illusory Lightness and Transparency in Monocular and Binocular Images: The role of contour junctions. Perception , 26, 419-454. (preprint) pdf

Anderson, B.L., and Sinha, P. (1997) Reciprocal Interactions Between Occlusion and Motion Computations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 94, 3477-3480. (preprint ) pdf

Anderson, B.L., and Julesz, B.(1995) A theoretical analysis of illusory contour formation in stereopsis. Psychological Review, 102, 705-743. (preprint) pdf

Anderson, B.L., and Nakayama, K. (1994) Toward a General Theory of Stereopsis: Binocular Matching, Occluding Contours, and Fusion. Psychological Review, 101, 414-445.

Anderson, B.L. (1994) The Role of Partial Occlusion in Stereopsis. Nature, 367, 365-368.

Anderson, B.L. (1992) Hysteresis, cooperativity, and depth averaging in dynamic random-dot stereograms. Perception & Psychophysics, 51, 511-528.

Mowafy, L., Lappin, J., Anderson, B.L., & Mauk, D.L. (1992) Temporal factors in the discrimination of coherent motion. Perception & Psychophysics, 52, 508-518.