Abstract

Shape and depth perception is useful for almost every activity of life, including picking up a cup of tea, walking through a door and sitting down to listen to a talk. Accurate perception of depth is critical for shape perception but there are considerable individual differences in how well people can both judge stereoscopic depth and use alternative cues to depth. In particular, these can change with age and along the autism spectrum.  In this talk Dr Allen will discuss different influences on depth and shape judgements, including the role of prior knowledge, the effect of age, and the effect on results of using the whole range of stereo ability. She will report studies using standard psychophysical/behaviour methods but also in more active tasks like balancing or catching and will also report results of a large questionnaire study suggesting that depth perception can influence social skills.

Biography

Harriet is an Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of Nottingham. She received her PhD from Nottingham and then left to work at McGill and Birmingham Universities, before returning to Nottingham. She’s been embedded in both psychophysics and visual cognition and neuropsychology and likes to combine these different approaches to investigate how vision works with the rest of the brain.

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/psychology/people/h.a.allen