Consciousness & Cognition Lab (Dr. Paul Azzopardi)

paul.azzopardi@psy.ox.ac.uk

Our research focuses on the neural basis of perception and conscious awareness, including the visual perception of motion, models of perceptual decisions, and disorders of perception and conscious awareness arising from brain damage such as found in patients with blindsight and visual neglect.

Brain damage affecting the striate cortex that causes blindsight - patients' ability to detect or discriminate visual stimuli which they deny seeing. Blindsight is of special interest to scientists and philosophers because it implies that conscious awareness of visual stimuli depends on intact striate cortex, and that activity in other visual areas of the brain is by itself incapable of sustaining a conscious visual representation.

Our team

Paul Azzopardi

Director of Undergraduate Studies

Selected publications

Illusory motion perception in blindsight.
Azzopardi P. and Hock HS., (2011), Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 108, 876 - 881
Evaluation of a 'bias-free' measure of awareness.
Evans S. and Azzopardi P., (2007), Spat Vis, 20, 61 - 77
Cerebral activity related to guessing and attention during a visual detection task.
Azzopardi PJ. and Cowey A None., (2002), Cortex, 38, 833 - 836
Why is blindsight blind?
Azzopardi P. and Cowey A., (2001), Out of Mind: Varieties of Unconscious Processes, 3 - 19
Motion discrimination in cortically blind patients.
Azzopardi P. and Cowey A., (2001), Brain, 124, 30 - 46
Uneven mapping of magnocellular and parvocellular projections from the lateral geniculate nucleus to the striate cortex in the macaque monkey.
Azzopardi P. et al, (1999), Vision Res, 39, 2179 - 2189
Is blindsight like normal, near-threshold vision?
Azzopardi P. and Cowey A., (1997), Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 94, 14190 - 14194
Preferential representation of the fovea in the primary visual cortex.
Azzopardi P. and Cowey A., (1993), Nature, 361, 719 - 721

Related research themes

Cognitive Neuroscientists seek to understand how the cognitive mechanisms that guide human behaviour are implemented in the neural circuitry of the brain.

Cognitive Neuroscience