Research Topic: Face Perception & Colour

Colours, Faces and Mrs Thatcher's Bikini

Ever wondered what a Thatcherized image of Tony Blair might look like? Neither had we, but the result is pretty amusing. Back in December 2007 at the AVA Christmas Meeting Professor Stuart Anstis presented us with some new illusions to help us to understand how we perceive colour, motion and faces. Stuart discusses the theory, with a multitude of visual treats along the way.

Watch Professor Anstis' lecture again with slides and audio on our website.

Research Topic: Functional Brain Imaging

Memory and Prediction: That's what the brain is in business for

Professor Vincent Di Lollo presented his re-entrant theory of perception and cognition to the OPAM meeting in November 2007, just prior to Psychonomics.

Using evidence from behavioural manifestations such as visual masking, and electrophysiological evidence from MEG and event-related potentials, he demonstrates how this concept naturally resolves issues of perceptual categories and the "binding problem".

Find out more about Professor Di Lollo and watch this fascinating lecture with slides and audio and on our website.

Other News from CRS

Four decades of spatial frequency channels: a scale-space view of spatial vision

A celebration of the Campbell and Robson (1968) classic paper will be held on Wednesday 16th April in Cambridge.

CRS raise money for Deafblind UK with a Christmas Prize Draw!

In the spirit of the holiday season, CRS employees put together all the gifts we received from our suppliers into a raffle to raise money for UK based charity Deafblind. Shaun Simpson won the top prize of a TomTom Sat Nav system and commented that for him "giving is winning".

Sponsored Talks

Cambridge Research Systems is committed to a programme of active involvement in a wide range of academic and research activities. We are looking forward to busy schedule of conferences, meetings and sponsored lectures in 2008. The following talks are scheduled to be recorded in the first half of 2008 and will appear soon after in the Research area of our website:

	Applied Vision Association Annual Meeting & AGM 1st April 2008 The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
	G J Burton Memorial Lecture "Magnocellular processing in autism" Dr Kate Plaisted Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK

Best Visual Illusion of the Year© Contest 2008
11th May 2008
Philharmonic Center for the Arts, Naples, Florida, USA

CRS is very happy to continue our association with this entertaining and insightful event. We are particularly pleased to see more and more CRS customers competing and doing so well in the contest, click through to our website to find out about last year's winners and to see some of the intriguing illusions.

The rate of change in the consumer electronics market is incredibly fast; research scientists can often exploit the increasing power and falling cost of general purpose computer hardware in their laboratories. However, sometimes when a whole industry changes their basic product technology it can catch us out and force us to think a little harder about what equipment to use for a particular experiment.

This has recently been the case with display technologies as almost all computer monitor manufacturers have switched from making CRTs to solely selling LCDs: just think about when you went to the store to buy that nice new flat screen HD TV during the holidays; how many CRT based TVs did you notice? The answer was probably none.

For many applications the industry's shift to flat screen technology can be viewed in a very positive way, but for vision scientists this can create a problem as LCD technology works in an entirely different way to the CRTs that we have been using for the last 30 years. To find out more about some of the differences between the technologies and to understand how to choose the most appropriate one for your future experiments, visit the new Display Technology section of our website.

Awards, Prizes and Medals
CRS would like to extend their congratulations to the following Vision Scientists in receiving some very prestigious awards. Click through to our website to find out about the awards and prize winners.

Undergraduate Summer Schools - Deadlines approaching!
It's that time of year when institutions across the world open up the application process to their undergraduate summer schools. Although the deadline has almost passed for some, CRS have the details for some of those still accepting applications:

Summer Color Science Course Rochester Institute of Technology click for more >

For more Vision News, visit our home page each week to read reports on the latest stories we have found from the Vision Science Community. If you've got some news to share, let us know and we'll add it to the feed on our website.