Research
The lab participates in ViiHM - an EPSRC research network to foster interdisciplinary research between biological and machine vision. See above key note from the BMVA 2019 Symposium. London. British Computer Society.
Our work is funded by grants from: ESRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, British Academy, Royal Society, NHS (BCUHB), Welsh Assembly Government, British Psychological Society, Experimental Psychology Society & Welcome Trust. We are currently involved in the COVID-CNS UK consortium project (£2.3M UKRI) assessing the neurological, neuropsychiatric and cognitive consequences of SARS-COV-2 infection:
https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/neurosciences-research-unit/research/covid-cns-study/
The goal of our work is to further knowledge about the neurobiological foundations of high-level human brain function. We apply these insights to better understand impaired brain function in clinical neurological populations, develop novel hypothesis-driven approaches to treatment and rehabilitation, and explore how insights from understanding the human brain can support technological innovation across a range of domains including machine vision and robotics. Our work uses state-of-the-art methods in perceptual psychophysics, eye tracking, event-related potentials (ERPs), functional brain imaging (e.g., fMRI), brain stimulation techniques (e.g., TMS), computational modeling (e.g., deep learning/DNNs) and neuropsychological studies of individuals with acquired cognitive impairments arising from strokes, infections and degenerative illnesses. We have several ongoing projects with an applied focus. These include work on the development of non-drug based cognitive interventions for the treatment of motor disability in disorders such as Parkinson's disease and the investigation of individual differences in how stress affects the human attention system. We also work with machine vision and robotics collaborators on the development of biologically-inspired robotics and machine vision applications.
Some of the key research questions we are currently looking at:
Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience: What are the underlying cognitive and neurobiological substrates of the human vision and attention systems? And how are these systems affected by damage to the brain arising from neurological disorders such as strokes and degenerative illnesses?
Computational Neurobiology: What can deep neural networks (DNNs) tell us about biological vision? See the key note talks on DNNs and biological vision from the 2019 VIIHM BMVA Symposium and 2020 AVA Xmas Meeting.
Neurological Illness: Treatment and Rehabilitation. Can hypothesis-driven approaches to targeted neurocognitive stimulation help ameliorate motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease?
Machine Vision and Robotics: Can our knowledge of function in the normal and impaired brain be applied to enhance performance in adaptive robotics systems?