In this episode we interview Associate Professor Sam Schwarzkopf.

Assoc Prof Schwarzkopf research seeks to better understand why people perceive the world the way they do. Early experiments suggested a correlation between the functional architecture of early visual cortex and the strength of contextual visual processing. This has led us to formulate hypotheses how sensory information is interpreted by the brain for making perceptual judgements. Our on-going research uses encoding models based on population receptive field mapping to reconstruct subtle differences in stimulus processing associated with perceptual experience. We predominantly used this approach for the study of apparent stimulus size. More recently, we have also applied this method to investigate the neural signature of ambiguous perceptual grouping.