Dr Ben Vincent, School of Psychology, University of Dundee
How do we decide what to believe and what should we do about it?
I am currently interested in using Bayesian decision theory to gain insight into: visual processing and attention, how we search for items of interest, how we utilise information, how we combine expectations with observations, and also cognitive decision making.
who am I?
I am Dr Benjamin Vincent. I have been a lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Dundee since 2007. Before that I was a postdoc at the University of Bristol with Prof. Tom Troscianko and Prof Iain D. Gilchrist. And before that I obtained both my undergraduate degree (Neuroscience, 1st Class Hons) and DPhil (Neuroscience, supervised by Dr Roland Baddeley) at the University of Sussex.
who I've worked with
I'm fortunate to have collaborated with Dr Ben Tatler, Dr Roland Baddeley, Prof. Iain Gilchrist, Prof. Tom Troscianko, Dr Casimier Ludwig, Dr Ute Leonards, Prof. Peter Jones, and Agne Taraseviciute.
If you are interested in collaborating on any issues relating to inference and attention, then please drop me an email.
journal reviewing activity
I am an ad hoc reviewer for the following journals:
Journal of the Optical Society of America A;
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance;
Journal of Vision;
Vision Research;
Journal of Computational Neuroscience;
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology;
Journal of Eye Movement Research;
Transactions of Applied Perception.
public engagement
I think it is incredibly important that the scientific community engage with the public. We must make science accessible, and convey its fun and creative nature. When I took up my lectureship at Dundee, I co-founded Cafe Science Dundee. This is part of the international Cafe Scientifique movement which aims to bring scientists and normal people together in a relaxed, and caffeine rich, setting. Many past talk videos are available via our YouTube channel.
News
Dec, 2011
New paper published: Covert visual search: Prior beliefs are optimally combined with sensory evidence in the Journal of Vision.
Sept, 2011
Presented a talk at a small invitation only workshop in India. The workshop was on visual attention and I discussed soon to be published work on optimal covert visual attention.
Aug, 2011
Presented results from my recent paper on visual search asymmetry at ECVP.
Aug, 2011
Gave a talk at ECEM on how the expectations and visual observations are combined in order to drive eye movements.
April, 2011
Book chapter published entitled Information theory and perception: the role of constraints, and what do we maximise information about?
Mar, 2011
Gave a seminar at the School of Psychology at University of Edinburgh on the topic of combining expectations and observations in visual search.
Feb, 2011.
I won the CASS Public Engagement Award for work I have done with Cafe Science Dundee.
Aug, 2010.
I presented a talk at ECVP on a 3rd factor to add to bottom-up and top-down influences in eye guidance.
May, 2010
Gave a seminar at the School of Informatics at University of Edinburgh on the topic of energy efficient neural coding.
Mar, 2010
I have released MATLAB code for people to calculate energy efficient receptive fields, either in retina or V1.
Feb/Mar, 2010
Gave a poster at COSYNE 2010 and an invited talk at the workshop session entitled (High-level perception as Bayesian inference).
Feb, 2010
Gave a seminar talk at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen.
Jan 2010
Online pre-print of latest paper available here. This was a very exciting collaboration with myself and biologists in the USA. We used knowledge from human visual processing and 'active contours' to help analyse 3D cell cultures to advance the study of breast cancer.
Nov 2009
Professor Andrew Howes came to visit the lab and gave a seminar talk on his recent Psych Review paper.
Sep, Oct, Nov 2009
I'm very excited to have started my 4th year undergrad class on Decision Making. While I get that, and the rest of my teaching done, research is on hold for a little while. Normal service should be resumed from December.
August 2009
I will be presenting some of my latest work at ECVP 2009, entitled Optimal visual search: combining what you expect with what you see. Download the poster pdf.
June 2009
New paper published online: Do we look at lights? Using mixture modelling to distinguish between low- and high-level factors in natural image viewing. This paper presents a novel application of mixture modelling to analyse the relative importance of multiple low- and high-level factors in scene viewing for the first time.
May 2009
Journal of Vision paper published, Optimal feature integration in visual search. This paper is the first of many planned which aims to examine attentional phenomena as being by-products of optimal inference.
April 2009
In press paper available. Another collaboration with Ben Tatler. The prominence of behavioural biases in eye guidance, takes a Bayesian look at overt attention and proposes that biases are a major factor in eye movements. [pdf]
2008
Paper published in JEMR as part of a special issue. Systematic tendencies in scene viewing, datamines eye movement data to examine temporal interactions in saccades.