Research Interests
293 Statistics Lab Personnel Department of Psychology
206B Benton Hall
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio 45056
(513) 529-1754 (voice)
(513) 529-2420 (fax)
olzakla@muohio.edu (e-mail)
Identifying and psychophysically describing systems of cortical
neurons and neural mechanisms that underlie basic visual
processes. My interests focus on the perception of brightness,
color, and patterns, on mechanisms underlying figure-ground
segregation. I use computer-generated images to measure normal
human performance in a visual task. Changes in performance
under different conditions permit inferences about the underlying
neural mechanisms, from which I develop quantitative models of
these mechanisms and processes. I have recently described a
model of two families of specialized neural pathways. One is
tailored to signal information about object borders and may be
involved in shape recognition. The other signals information about
surface textures. Both may be involved in scene segregation. I am
currently exploring the properties of these and other mid-level
cortical processes.