Tim Andrews
Professor

Profile

Biography

Kingston University
BSc Biology
University of London
PhD Neurobiology

Career

Duke University
Postdoc, Department of Neurobiology
University of Oxford
Postdoc, University Laboratory of Physiology
University of Durham
Lecturer, Department of Psychology

Departmental roles

Director, MSc Cognitive Neuroscience

Research

Overview

Vision begins with light entering our eyes. Through a succession of processing stages, the brain constructs a perception of what lies outside, transforming patterns of light into objects we can use, people we can recognise, and places we can go. My research interests focus on understanding how the brain transforms patterns of light into our perception of the visual world. For a long time, people have understood vision in terms of isolated modules: so there’s a bit for faces, one for chairs, one for tables and so on. What our work has led us to believe is that things aren’t quite as localised as people originally thought. Rather than having specific areas for specific objects, our research suggests that the brain uses a general code that is based on visual properties, like colour, contrast, size and shape.

I have a particular interest in how the brain processes faces. There’s an awful lot of information that you can get from a face. You can identify different people, and even get an idea of their thoughts and feelings through facial expression. But facial identity and facial expression are recognised using different visual properties. The shape of your face is changing all the time: your lips move, you raise your eyebrows, you turn your head. The brain uses these different shapes to determine your changing facial expressions. On the other hand, the texture of your face - your skin, your hair, and how they reflect light - is much more stable. Because it doesn’t change, it’s much more useful for working out your identity, no matter what your expression is. Recent work in the lab has used naturalistic paradigms to probe the neural correlates of face recognition.

WordCloud