Recent publications and other activities
My most recent books are "The Psychology of Art", and "Foundations of Sensation and Perception", both published by Routledge. Recent research papers investigate the influence of natural scene statistics on aesthetic judgements, and the role of the mobile pupil in illusions of visual motion.
See the Publications section for details of my publications.
Recent presentations include poster presentations at Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting in the USA (2024), at the European Conference on Visual Perception (2024) in Scotland, and at the Brain and Intergrative Vision Conference (2025) in Canada, all in collaboration with Patrick Cavanagh.
Brief Profile
My academic training is in psychological science (BA degree from the University of Sheffield and PhD from the University of Reading). After completing my PhD in 1979, my academic career began with research positions at the University of Reading, then York University (Canada), and University College London. I was appointed to a New Blood Lectureship at the University of Sussex in 1984. I have held an academic position at Sussex for most of my academic career since then, becoming a Full Professor in 2000, a Visiting Professor 2011-2014 and an Honorary Professor 2022-on. I was a Full Professor at the University of Lincoln from 2011 to 2022, where I became an Emeritus Professor upon my retirement. In 2023 I was awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship at the University of Sussex, with funding to investigate illusions of visual motion perception (see here for a description).
My research interests in human vision include movement perception, visual after-effects, perceptual factors is sport, and the perception of visual art. PDFs of most of my publications can be found in the Publications section.
Much of my research has been funded by major UK science funding bodies (listed in the Research section). I recently stepped down from the editorial board of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B, and am currently on the editorial board of the journals Perception/iPerception. I am a member of the Experimental Psychology Society and of the Applied Vision Association and an Emeritus Member of the Vision Sciences Society.