Dr Mauro Manassi

Dr Mauro Manassi

Potential PhD Projects:

Object recognition in context
We are constantly surrounded by complex and cluttered scenes. In such cluttered environments, visual perception is primarily limited by crowding, the deleterious influence of nearby objects on object recognition. In several projects, we investigate how crowding occurs in the complex scenes we experience in everyday life.

Perceptual stability
From moment to moment, we perceive the identities of objects and people in the world as stable and continuous even though their image properties frequently change due to factors like occlusion, visual noise, changes in viewpoint, and eye movements. In a series of studies, we aim to investigate the underlying mechanism(s) of serial dependence, and under which conditions it promotes a stable environment.

Lifelong perceptual adaptation
Over the course of our entire life, our visual system is constantly exposed to the physical properties of our visual environment. Consequently, it was recently proposed that our visual system becomes more sensitive to attributes that are presented more often in the environment, and less sensitive to the ones which are rarely presented. In our studies, we aim to identify which aspects of our visual environment shape our perception across our life span, from young to old age.