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Perception lab
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Collaborators
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Hannah Smithson
Professor of Experimental Psychology
Takuma Morimoto
BEng, MEng, DPhil
Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow, Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College
Research Interest
In daily life, we encounter materials with a range of visual properties such as metal, cloth, or plastic. Through sight alone, we are skilled at judging their colour, glossiness, lightness, shape, and translucency; at inferring their associated physical properties, such as light/heavy, soft/hard, rough/smooth; and even their states, such as wet/dry, clean/dirty, solid/melted. Humans use these visually-collected information to guide our behaviour in everyday life (e.g, we can carefully step on the slippery pavement).
My research is inspired by a fundamental question in neuroscience: How do we achieve stable perception of "stuff" based on sensor inputs that are highly variable across contexts? We aim to understand the mechanisms underlying this perceptual stability using psychophysics and recently developed machine learning algorithms.
Recent publications
Eye movements efficiently expose single cone photoreceptors to global scene color statistics.
Journal article
Morimoto T. et al, (2026), iScience, 29
Investigating ethnicity-related variability in the human L-cone spectral sensitivity function.
Journal article
Schneider AC. et al, (2026), Vision Res, 243
Spectral dataset of natural objects’ reflectance from the Southern cone of South America
Journal article
Gutiérrez A. et al, (2025), Scientific Data, 12
Surface color under environmental illumination
Conference paper
SMITHSON HE. and MORIMOTO T., (2025)