Centre Attention & Vision du LPP UMR 8158 – 45 rue des Saints Peres 75006 Paris, France

Lab Members

Le Chef

Patrick Cavanagh

I started as a computer/electrical engineer, wanting to make thinking computers. But then I thought, why not study the really big computer. I retooled in Pittsburgh, moved to Montreal and then Cambridge and now Paris. Research in vision is an adventure of discovery, full of surprises and challenges, with the ever pleasant company of hardy, ingenious colleagues and students. We are like tourists observing and describing the mysterious customs and rituals of the visual system. OK, sometimes the weather turns bad, the luggage is lost, and we take the wrong road. But what a fabulous trip. Currently traveling through attention and the position sense.

email
room: H431f
tel: +33(0)6.88.39.36.90

Postdoctoral Fellows

John Greenwood

My interest in visual perception was sparked as an undergraduate at the Australian National University, where I also completed my PhD with Mark Edwards (2004-2007). My work in this time focussed on the integrative processes required to perceive multiple directions of motion simultaneously. These interests in low-level vision developed during a postdoctoral fellowship at University College London with Steven Dakin and Peter Bex (2008-2010). In this time I focussed on peripheral vision and crowding, the deleterious effect of ‘clutter’ on object recognition, in both the ‘normal’ visual system and in children with amblyopia. Along the way I have also examined our perception of depth, position, and numerosity, as well as change-detection and attention. I am endlessly fascinated by the many tasks accomplished by the brain, and hope to uncover more of its secrets as I examine issues in spatial vision and crowding with Patrick Cavanagh and the CAVlab.
email
room: H431b
tel:+33(0)1.42.86.21.99

Graduate Students

Arielle Veenemans

After finishing an MSc in Neurosciences at Utrecht University including an 8 month internship at the Vision Lab in Boston, I started a PhD with Patrick Cavanagh in the CAV lab in Paris in November 2008. I am interested in many different aspects of vision such as crowding, grouping, object recognition, binding etc. The brain's ability to process an large amount of different elements in a matter of milliseconds and build a coherent concept from that information is truly amazing. However, the brain sometimes fails or takes an alternative approach, which can also help us understand the mechanisms behind perception better. And why does the brain choose to use certain cues while ignoring others? These are all questions that keep me busy. Apart from psychophysics I have a sweet tooth for fMRI and would like to learn about other techniques some time in the future as well.
email
room: H414
tel:+33(0)1.42.86.21.96

Florian Perdreau

Firstly I finished a Master in philosophy at the University of Tours (France) in 2008 during which I studied the perception/action relationship in the Henri Bergson’s work. Given that I had obtained a metaphysical background on this issue, I wanted to approach this problem through a cognitive view. Then I have started a Master in Cognitive Sciences (ENS, EHESS, and Paris 5) in 2009, and I worked on pre-saccadic attention in 10-month-old infants at the Laboratoire de Psychologie de la Perception (CNRS, UMR 8158). Starting my second year of Master this year, I joined the CAV Lab to understand how pictorial artists could overcome their final (distal) percept and access to a more accurate representation of a to-be-drawn object. Generally, my research interests are perceptual learning, perception/action influences and top-down attentional processes.
email
room: H418b
tel:+33(0)1.42.86.42.65

Master Students

Agnès Falco

email