Undergraduates/interns

Current

Harri Cornford, Luke Hymas

Luke and Harri are working on avoiding visual discomfort during video conferencing for their third-year psychology dissertation.

Vornet Hamoonga

Vornet is working with Beth Nichol of the OCTAHEDRON project on public attitudes to medical screening using AI.



Former

Peter Cox, Emily Haworth, Ross Theobald

Emily Haworth
Ross Theobald
Peter Cox


Ross, Emily and Peter did their third-year Psychology dissertation on confirmation and omission biases in attitudes to vaccination.

Matthew Parry

Matthew was a Physics student doing a final year project on praying mantis stereopsis.

Yi Ting Tan

Tan Yi Ting was a Biomedical Sciences student doing a final year project on mantis attention, mainly supervised by Dr Vivek Nityananda.

Zhen Yi Wong
Zhen Yi Wong

Zhen Yi Wong is a medical student at NUMed, Newcastle’s medical school in Malaysia, who won a summer vacation scholarship to work in the lab and compared versions of our Asteroid stereo test with “large” vs “small” dots.

Publications with Wong ZY

Read JCA, Wong ZY, Yek X, Wong YX, Bachtoula O, Llamas-Cornejo I, Serrano-Pedraza (2020)
ASTEROID stereotest v1.0: lower stereo thresholds using smaller, denser and faster dots
Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics https://doi.org/10.1111/opo.12737



Xinye Yek
Xinye “Jenny” Yek

Jenny was a medical student at NUMed, Newcastle’s medical school in Malaysia. She won a summer vacation scholarship to work in the lab, where she compared visual acuity measured with letters vs measured with grating stimuli.

Publications with Yek X

Read JCA, Wong ZY, Yek X, Wong YX, Bachtoula O, Llamas-Cornejo I, Serrano-Pedraza (2020)
ASTEROID stereotest v1.0: lower stereo thresholds using smaller, denser and faster dots
Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics https://doi.org/10.1111/opo.12737



Ying Xin WongYing Xin “Natalie” Wong

Natalie was a medical student at NUMed, Newcastle’s medical school in Malaysia. She tested out our new contrast sensitivity test run on a tablet, using letters.

Publications with Wong YX

Read JCA, Wong ZY, Yek X, Wong YX, Bachtoula O, Llamas-Cornejo I, Serrano-Pedraza (2020)
ASTEROID stereotest v1.0: lower stereo thresholds using smaller, denser and faster dots
Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics https://doi.org/10.1111/opo.12737





Abigail Muir
Abigail Muir

Jan 7 2019 – Mar 21 2019
Abi did her Biomedical dissertation comparing visual acuity tests on our ASTEROID vision app with a standard clinical test.



Sammy Chan
Hui Haang “Sammy” Chan

Sep 2018 – Feb 2019
Sammy did his Psychology dissertation with the M3 team, looking at stereo correspondence in the praying mantis.




Lucy Turner

Sep 2018 – Feb 2019
Lucy did a joint honours degree in Psychology and Biology. Her dissertation examines aspects of disparity associated with nausea.


Henry Gale

Jun 2018 – Aug 2018
Henry is a Psychology student here at Newcastle, and is doing a summer internship in the lab. Henry has spent the majority of his time within the lab as acting supervisor for two Nuffield students. This has included enabling the students to perform data collection within the Great North Museum as well as guiding in the writing of their two reports and poster creation.

Publications with Gale H

Vancleef K, Serrano-Pedraza I, Sharp C, Slack G, Black C, Casanova T, Hugill J, Rafiq S, Burridge J, Puyat V, Ewane Enongue J, Gale H, Akotei H, Collier Z, Haggerty H, Smart K, Powell C, Taylor K, Clarke MP, Morgan G, Read JCA (2019)
ASTEROID: A New Clinical Stereotest on an Autostereo 3D Tablet
Translational Vision Science and Technology 8(1): 25 1-24





Jerry Tan
Jerry Tan

Jun 2018 – Aug 2018
Jerry is a medical student at NUMed, Newcastle’s medical school in Malaysia. He won a summer vacation scholarship to work in the lab, working with Vivek on mantis stereopsis.

Publications with Tan J

Nityananda V, Joubier C, Tan J, Tarawneh G, Read JCA (2019)
Motion-in-depth perception and prey capture in the praying mantis Sphodromantis lineola
Journal of Experimental Biology 222 jeb198614






Chuah Cheng Tong

Jun 2018 – Aug 2018
Chuah is a medical student at NUMed, Newcastle’s medical school in Malaysia. He won a summer vacation scholarship to work in the lab, working with Maydel and Chris on contrast sensitivity and visual comfort.

Reshma Modi
Reshma Modi

Jun 2018 – Aug 2018
Reshma plans to major in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Princeton, and is doing a summer internship with us on modelling praying mantis stereo vision.




Josee Ewane Enongue

Jan 2018 – March 2018
Josee did her Biomedical Sciences project on individual differences in stereopsis. Some of the data Josee collected was presented at the Vision Sciences Society annual meeting in May 2018 (Josee isn’t named as an author on the abstract as the abstract was submitted before she had begun work).

Publications with Ewane Enongue J

Vancleef K, Serrano-Pedraza I, Sharp C, Slack G, Black C, Casanova T, Hugill J, Rafiq S, Burridge J, Puyat V, Ewane Enongue J, Gale H, Akotei H, Collier Z, Haggerty H, Smart K, Powell C, Taylor K, Clarke MP, Morgan G, Read JCA (2019)
ASTEROID: A New Clinical Stereotest on an Autostereo 3D Tablet
Translational Vision Science and Technology 8(1): 25 1-24





Olivia Harding

Sept 2017 – March 2018
Olivia did her third-year Psychology dissertation on motion perception in the praying mantis.


Vicente Puyat

June 2017 – Feb 2018
Vito read Psychology here at Newcastle. He won a university vacation scholarship to support him during a summer project in my lab, studying how stereoacuity is affected by motion in depth, and is now doing his third-year dissertation in the lab.

Publications with Puyat V

Vancleef K, Serrano-Pedraza I, Sharp C, Slack G, Black C, Casanova T, Hugill J, Rafiq S, Burridge J, Puyat V, Ewane Enongue J, Gale H, Akotei H, Collier Z, Haggerty H, Smart K, Powell C, Taylor K, Clarke MP, Morgan G, Read JCA (2019)
ASTEROID: A New Clinical Stereotest on an Autostereo 3D Tablet
Translational Vision Science and Technology 8(1): 25 1-24

Read JCA, Rafiq S, Hugill J, Casanova T, Black C, O'Neill A, Puyat V, Haggerty H, Smart K, Powell C, Taylor K, Clarke MP, Vancleef K (2019)
Characterizing the Randot Preschool stereotest: Testability, norms, reliability, specificity and sensitivity in children aged 2-11 years
PLOS ONE 14(11)




Ruben Douglas
Ruben Douglas

Jun – Sep 2017
Ruben did a four-year integrated MSci in Zoology at Bristol. He won a Rank Prize Fund vacation scholarship to support him during a summer project jointly in my lab and that of Dr Nicholas Roberts at Bristol, studying visual perception in the praying mantis.

Tyisha Griffiths
Tyisha Griffiths

Jun – Aug 2017
While majoring in Neuroscience at Princeton University, Tyisha did a summer internship in the lab, studying how stereoacuity is affected by image statistics.

Jeff Wu
Jeffrey Wu

Jun – Aug 2016
Jeff majored in philosophy at Princeton. He interned in the lab over the summer, using a high-speed camera and video tracking software to study the characteristics of praying mantis strikes to virtual 3D stimuli.

Ayaka Tsutsumi
Ayaka Tsutsumi

Jan – Mar 2016
Ayaka did the 3rd year project for her Biomedical Sciences degree with us. Working with PhD student Zoltan Derzsi, she measured EEG responses to binocular disparity.

Jonothon Marshall

Jan – Mar 2016
Jonothon is another Biomedical Sciences student who did his 3rd year project in the lab. Working with Ghaith Tarawneh, he measured human perception of anti-correlated stereograms depicting moving objects, in order to compare with behavioural responses in praying mantis.


Nikki Goodship

Nicola Goodship

Jun – Aug 2015
Nikki helped out with the ASTEROID project over the summer after her first year studying psychology at Bath University.

Publications with Goodship N

Vancleef K, Read JCA, Herbert W, Goodship N, Woodhouse M, Serrano-Pedraza I (2017)
Overestimation of stereo thresholds by the TNO stereotest is not due to global stereopsis.
Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics 37(4) 507-520

Vancleef K, Read JCA, Herbert W, Goodship N, Woodhouse M, Serrano-Pedraza I (2018)
Two choices good, four choices better: For measuring stereoacuity in children, a four-alternative forced-choice paradigm is more efficient than two
PLoS ONE 13(7): e0201366 1-15

Serrano-Pedraza I, Vancleef K, Herbert W, Goodship N, Woodhouse M, Read JCA (2020)
Efficient estimation of stereo thresholds: What slope should be assumed for the psychometric function?
PLOS ONE



Robert Aguilar

Robert Aguilar

Jun – Aug 2015
Rob was the second Princeton student to do a summer project in the lab, following Kevin Mizes in 2014. At Princeton, Rob was studying computer science and neuroscience. In Newcastle, he studied a large data-set of neurons collected in Bruce Cumming’s lab at NIH.

William HerbertWilliam Herbert

Jun – Aug 2014; Nov 2014 – Mar 2015 ; Jun – Aug 2015
Will first worked with us when he won a University Vacation Scholarship to support him during a summer project where he investigated praying mantis motion perception. He then did his third year psychology project in the lab, studying the development of stereo vision. Will came back again to work in the lab the summer after completing his psychology degree here at Newcastle.

Publications with Herbert W

Nityananda V, Tarawneh G, Jones L, Busby N, Herbert W, Davies R, Read JCA (2015)
The contrast sensitivity function of the praying mantis Sphodromantis lineola
Journal of Comparative Physiology A 201(8) 741-50

Serrano-Pedraza I, Herbert W, Villa-Laso L, Widdall M, Vancleef K, Read JCA (2016)
The stereoscopic anisotropy develops during childhood.
Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science 57(3) 960-70

Vancleef K, Read JCA, Herbert W, Goodship N, Woodhouse M, Serrano-Pedraza I (2017)
Overestimation of stereo thresholds by the TNO stereotest is not due to global stereopsis.
Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics 37(4) 507-520

Tarawneh G, Nityananda V, Rosner R, Errington S, Herbert W, Cumming BG, Read JCA, Serrano-Pedraza I (2017)
Invisible noise obscures visible signal in insect motion detection
Scientific Reports 7: 3496 1-14

Tarawneh G, Nityananda V, Rosner R, Errington S, Herbert W, Arranz-Paraíso S, Busby N, Tampin J, Read JCA, Serrano-Pedraza I (2018)
Contrast thresholds reveal different visual masking functions in humans and praying mantises
Biology Open 7(4). pii: bio029439. doi: 10.1242/bio.029439.

Vancleef K, Read JCA, Herbert W, Goodship N, Woodhouse M, Serrano-Pedraza I (2018)
Two choices good, four choices better: For measuring stereoacuity in children, a four-alternative forced-choice paradigm is more efficient than two
PLoS ONE 13(7): e0201366 1-15

Serrano-Pedraza I, Vancleef K, Herbert W, Goodship N, Woodhouse M, Read JCA (2020)
Efficient estimation of stereo thresholds: What slope should be assumed for the psychometric function?
PLOS ONE



Steven Errington

Jan 2011 – Aug 2013; Jun – Aug 2015
This summer we’re also welcoming back Steven. I first met Steven when he was a psychology student at Northumbria University; his keen interest in the field led him to do an internship in my lab where he worked on measuring humans’ ability to judge the simultaneity of visual stimuli. He went on to an MRes in neuroscience here at Newcastle and followed that with a PhD at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

Publications with Errington S

Nityananda V, Tarawneh G, Errington S, Serrano-Pedraza I, Read JCA (2017)
The optomotor response of the praying mantis is driven predominantly by the central visual field
Journal of Comparative Physiology A 203 77-87

Tarawneh G, Nityananda V, Rosner R, Errington S, Herbert W, Cumming BG, Read JCA, Serrano-Pedraza I (2017)
Invisible noise obscures visible signal in insect motion detection
Scientific Reports 7: 3496 1-14

Tarawneh G, Nityananda V, Rosner R, Errington S, Herbert W, Arranz-Paraíso S, Busby N, Tampin J, Read JCA, Serrano-Pedraza I (2018)
Contrast thresholds reveal different visual masking functions in humans and praying mantises
Biology Open 7(4). pii: bio029439. doi: 10.1242/bio.029439.



Matthieu Gelin

Jan – Mar 2015
Matthieu did his 3rd year physiology project in my lab, working on a phenomenon of binocular vision known as Ogle’s induced effect.

Felicity Rae
Felicity Rae

Jan – Mar 2015
Felicity did her 3rd year physiology project in my lab, examining whether acute ethanol intoxication affects psychophysical surround suppression on a contrast detection task.



Cem Aydogdu
Cem Aydogdu

Jan – Mar 2015
Cem did his 3rd year physiology project in my lab, studying how covering one eye for relatively short periods of time (<2 hrs) can affect vision.


Aniketa Khushu
Aniketa Khushu

Jun – Aug 2014
Aniketa is reading Natural Sciences at Cambridge University. This summer, she’s in the lab working with Paul Hands on a psychophysics experiment looking at size perception in 3D TV.



Kevin Mizes
Kevin Mizes

Jun – Aug 2014
Kevin is majoring in physics at Princeton. He is over in the UK doing a summer project in my lab in collaboration with Dr Gordon Berman at Princeton, looking at mantis motion and behaviour.

Elena Zamfir
Elena Zamfir

Jun – Aug 2014
Elena has two Masters degrees in various aspects of mathematics from the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, and from the University of Bucuresti,Romania, to add to her undergraduate maths degree. So she’s not an undergraduate, but my “Masters student” page is for people doing their Masters projects in my lab, so it seemed easier to add Elena here along with the other students working in the lab over the long hot summer of 2014. Elena is bringing her mathematical skill to bear on modelling how a classic Reichardt motion detector would respond to one of our mantis experiments.

Natalie Busby
Natalie Busby

Jan – Mar, Jul-Aug 2014
Nat did a joint honours degree in Biology and Psychology. She did an optional 10-credit joint honours project in my lab, looking at visual perception in the praying mantis with Lisa Hindmarsh.

Publications with Busby N

Nityananda V, Tarawneh G, Jones L, Busby N, Herbert W, Davies R, Read JCA (2015)
The contrast sensitivity function of the praying mantis Sphodromantis lineola
Journal of Comparative Physiology A 201(8) 741-50

Tarawneh G, Nityananda V, Rosner R, Errington S, Herbert W, Arranz-Paraíso S, Busby N, Tampin J, Read JCA, Serrano-Pedraza I (2018)
Contrast thresholds reveal different visual masking functions in humans and praying mantises
Biology Open 7(4). pii: bio029439. doi: 10.1242/bio.029439.



Robert Davies

Jan – Mar 2014
Rob was a biomedical sciences student doing his 3rd year project in my lab. Working with Lisa Hindmarsh, he carried out behavioural measures of contrast sensitivity in the praying mantis.

Publications with Davies R

Nityananda V, Tarawneh G, Jones L, Busby N, Herbert W, Davies R, Read JCA (2015)
The contrast sensitivity function of the praying mantis Sphodromantis lineola
Journal of Comparative Physiology A 201(8) 741-50



Patrick Taylor
Patrick Taylor

Jan – Mar 2014
Patrick was a physiology student doing his 3rd year project in my lab. Working with Paul Hands, he investigated how familiar-size and disparity cues combine in 3D television to result in a percept of object size and distance.

Michael Widdall
Michael Widdall

Jan – Mar 2013
Michael did his third-year project in my lab as part of his B.Sc. in Physiology, earning a First for his dissertation. In collaboration with Dr Ignacio Serrano-Pedraza at Madrid, he studied the development of stereopsis.



Josh Langton

Josh did a Computing Science degree here at Newcastle. For his third-year project, he studied using a 3D projector to produce an image with stereo disparity.


Claire Brash
Claire Brash

Claire did a summer project with me in 2010 under the Nuffield summer bursary scheme, and went on to read Medicine at Imperial College London; she is now a Pathfinder Fellow at the Royal College of Psychiatrists. I was delighted to welcome her back into my lab in 2012.

Publications with Brash C

Serrano-Pedraza I, Brash C, Read JCA (2013)
Testing the horizontal-vertical stereo anisotropy with the critical-band masking paradigm
Journal of Vision 13(11):15 1-15

Read JCA, Georgiou R, Brash C, Yazdani P, Whittaker R, Trevelyan A, Serrano-Pedraza I (2015)
Moderate acute alcohol intoxication has minimal effect on surround suppression measured with a motion direction discrimination task
Journal of Vision 15(1):5 1-14


 




Joseph Robson

Jan – Mar 2012
Joe did his third-year project in my lab as part of a B.Sc. in Biomedical Sciences. He worked on the scintillating Hermann grid illusion.

Publications with Robson J

Read JCA, Robson JH, Smith CL, Lucas AD (2012)
The scintillating grid illusion is enhanced by binocular viewing
i-Perception 3(10) 820–830




Christopher Smith

Jan – Mar 2012
Chris did his third-year project in my lab as part of a B.Sc. in Physiology. He worked on the scintillating Hermann grid illusion.

Publications with Smith C

Read JCA, Robson JH, Smith CL, Lucas AD (2012)
The scintillating grid illusion is enhanced by binocular viewing
i-Perception 3(10) 820–830




Ayse Djahit

Ayse Djahit

Jun-Aug 2010

Ayse won a Biomedical Vacation Scholarship from the Wellcome Trust to support her working in the lab over the summer, in collaboration with Andrew Trevelyan at the Institute of Aging & Health, on mechanisms of cortical inhibition.




Xavier Vaz

Jan-Mar 2010
Xavier was a Biomedical Sciences student here at Newcastle, and did his 3rd-year project in my lab, studying how dot contrast polarity affects the solution of the stereo correspondence problem.

Publications with Vaz X

Read JCA, Vaz X, Serrano-Pedraza I (2011)
Independent mechanisms for bright and dark image features in a stereo correspondence task
Journal of Vision 11(12):4 1-14



Olaoluwakitan Osunkunle

Summer of 2009
Ollie worked in my lab after finishing the second year of his medicine degree at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. He assisted us with a project on interocular suppression in children with intermittent exotropia, carrying out clinical tests of vision and collecting psychophysical data.

Publications with Osunkunle O

Serrano-Pedraza I, Manjunath V, Osunkunle O, Clarke MP, Read JCA (2011)
Visual suppression in intermittent exotropia during binocular alignment
Investigative Ophthalmology and Vision Science 52(5) 2352-2364



Albert Lim

Summer of 2007

After finishing the second year of his medicine degree here at Newcastle, Albert chose to spend his summer volunteering in my lab to gain experience of research. He has contributed large amounts of psychophysical data for Graeme’s PhD project, and helped out the Northern Kites Project by performing a statistical analysis of some of their data.



Emilia Iwanczuk

Summer of 2006
Emilia spent a summer volunteering in my lab after finishing the second year of her psychology undergraduate degree here at Newcastle. Emilia took measurements to help calibrate my stereoscope, did a literature search and review for me on mechanisms of filling-in, and took piles and piles of psychophysical data.