Read Lab Blog

Probability of two successive hits in a binary series

posted by Jenny on May 17, 2023

Here’s another in my occasional series of posts detailing small results I’ve produced that aren’t worth being published anywhere but I’d quite like to jot down for my own or others’ reference. Suppose you have a sequence of binary events. … Continue reading

François d’Aguilon – ahead of his time?

posted by Jenny on November 15, 2021

I’ve just downloaded d’Aguilon’s 1613 “Six Books of Optics” from the Internet Archive ( Opticorum Libri Sex by Aguilonius). It’s such a joy to have this classic texts freely available now. The downside is that it tempts me to go … Continue reading

Direction selectivity requires nonlinearity

posted by Jenny on November 19, 2019

Thanks to Damon Clark at Yale and Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth at Harvard for pointing out the following to me. I had always thought that you could get a direction-selective neuron with a linear filter that is spatiotemporally inseparable, so that … Continue reading

Natural Environments, Tasks & Intelligence

posted by Jenny on July 1, 2019

Back in April I attended the excellent NETI meeting at UT Austin. Here’s the group photo:

Everything you wanted to know about mantis breeding…

posted by Jenny on April 3, 2019

Check out our guide to mantis breeding, by top insect technician Adam Simmons.

Da Vinci Stereopsis

posted by Jenny on March 1, 2018

I have just been asked for “a succinct explanation of da Vinci stereopsis”. I googled in the hope of finding one, but couldn’t, so thought I’d put one up here. Leonardo da Vinci didn’t quite realise that stereoscopic depth perception … Continue reading

A Novel Form of Stereo Vision in the Praying Mantis

posted by Jenny on February 17, 2018

Our latest paper on mantis stereopsis has just come out in Current Biology. Briefly, we find that mantis stereopsis operates very differently from humans’: it is based on temporal change, and does not require the images to be correlated. We … Continue reading

Chris and Maydel explain their PhD projects

posted by Jenny on November 10, 2017

Lab members Chris Kaspiris-Rousellis, from Greece, and Maydel Fernandez Alonso, from Cuba, are Early Stage Researchers on the European Training Network on Full-Parallax Imaging. Here, they explain their projects. Find videos from all 15 ESRS here.

Vision Sciences Society meeting 2017

posted by Jenny on June 13, 2017

Sid, Maydel, Chris and I had an excellent time at the VSS meeting last month. Thanks to Ignacio for this snap of my talk on “When invisible noise obscures the signal: the consequences of nonlinearity in motion detection.” Sid gave … Continue reading

3D glasses with glasses

posted by Jenny on May 31, 2017

I was giving a talk recently about my work on viewer experience with stereoscopic 3D television, and an audience member asked a good question, which was: Was there any relationship between people complaining of adverse effects and whether they routinely … Continue reading

Life after PhD

posted by Jenny on February 22, 2017

I was happy to see this blog post from software developer Scott Logic, featuring Readlab alumnus Paul Hands. We wish you all the best in your new career, Paul, and it’s great to see you using your maths, computing and … Continue reading

Why don’t we see the world upside down?

posted by Jenny on January 20, 2017

This question comes up occasionally and I was just recently asked a similar question by email, so I thought it would be a good idea to do a blog post that everyone can see. Although there’s a great article on … Continue reading

“Blindness to background”

posted by Jenny on December 3, 2016

My former colleague Dr Catherine O’Hanlon, now at Aberystwyth, and I have just published a paper on an interesting effect we found in small children. The roots of this study go back 7 years to when my son was two … Continue reading

ETN-FPI TS2

posted by Jenny on November 29, 2016

Yes, it’s acronym time — by ETN-FPI TS2, I mean the second Training School of the European Training Network on Full-Parallax Imaging, which was held at the University of Valencia in September 2016. Chris Kaspiris-Rousellis and I attended, and had … Continue reading

Mantis videos

posted by Jenny on November 3, 2016

In our lab, we run experiments on praying mantis vision. We show the insects videos on a computer (mainly boring stimuli like bars moving, or little black dots which are meant to simulate a bug) and video how they move, … Continue reading

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