Lewis Baker

Graduate Student
Research Area: Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience


Interested in perspective taking, perception of agency & cognitive film theory.

Most people perceive a richly detailed visual world, complete with a range of colors, textures and dimensions. However, experiments in visual attention frequently paint a sparser visual world, whereby our actual experience is much more limeted than we believe. I am interested in the top-down and bottom-up influences of this conscious visual experience. In the bottom-up realm, I'm interested in the basic visual features that facilitate or hinder the detection of changes in the visual world. For this avenue I am researching how spatial presentaitons of a scene alter the detection of changes and the perception of events. In the top-down realm, I am researching how narrative, beliefs and emotional state affect our perception of objects as intentional or alive. I use mostly behavioral and psychophysical measures in these experiments. These research interests potentially lead to applications in law, the psychology of religion, and motion picture perception.

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