Solomon & Pelli (1994) The visual filter mediating letter identification. Nature 369, 395-397.

Pelli (1999) Close encounters - An artist shows that size affects shape. Science, 285, 844-846. [Reprinted in Best American Science Writing 2000.] [full text]

Welcome to the Pelli lab

How does the brain recognize objects, like letters, words, and faces? We've shown that the first step is independent detection of simple features by channels (PDF). But how do we put those features together? We've discovered that crowding is the failure of this binding, when too many features are included (HTML). This insight has enabled fast progress on old problems: Faces are recognized like words (HTML); Crowding determines reading rate (PDF). We are currently using a new feature-counting technique to analyze the feature-integration process underlying object recognition and reading. Our approach is mostly psychophysical. We measure thresholds on human observers. We are gearing up to do more brain imaging of the object recognition process. The pace is fast. Our experiments are simple. Our software is flexible. More often than not, we answer the question in a week. Many of these questions arise at the weekly lab meeting, where everyone participates in a free-for-all discussion of each person's project. We welcome visitors. Would you like to join us for a lab meeting?

News

• Denis started a blog, February 2010.
• Matthieu Dubois arrived from Belgium, bringing expertise in dyslexia, for a year-long collaboration.
• Rama Chakravarthi left to take up a position at CNRS - Centre de Recherche Cerveau et Cognition, Faculté de Médecine de Rangueil, Université Paul Sabatier, 31062 Toulouse, France. Best wishes there; we miss you here.
• Kat Tillman graduated and moved to Portland, Oregon, to write the great american novel (my words, not hers), a longstanding ambition. Good luck. It's a huge loss for us.
• "Crowding is the new black" is now a group in Facebook. Anyone can join.
• PARTY 2008: On Wednesday July 30, 6-8 PM we are hosting a paper publishing party to celebrate our own "uncrowded window" in Nature Neuroscience and anyone else's work being published now. KGB Bar. Everyone is welcome.
• VSS 2008. Crowding was big: a symposium, a talk session, and a poster session. Our lab gave six presentations (not all on crowding): 2 symposium talks, 2 regular talks, and 2 posters.
• PARTY 2007: On Thursday July 12 6-8 PM we are celebrating the publication of 4 papers (one on August 1 and three on October 26). Great Jones Cafe on Great Jones Street near the Bowery. Everyone is welcome.
• Crowding is cool. As noted above, we have four papers coming out in August-October. The Journal of Vision special issue on crowding (HTML) will have more than twenty articles, three from our lab. Our two published papers on crowding are are among the top twenty articles with highest demand factor at the Journal of Vision. There were lots of talks and posters about crowding at the annual Vision Sciences Society meeting. Eleven had the word "crowding" or "crowded" in their title. Kat Tillman and Jeremy 2007Freeman gave talks on crowding, which received comments like "fabulous". No one could believe that they are undergraduates.
• Sarah Rosen has joined our lab as a new graduate student. We are looking at development of crowding.
• Jordan Suchow is back from Brandeis for the summer to continue his project on learning features and letters.
• Rama Chakravarthi successfully defended his PhD thesis on masking of crowding at Harvard, having worked with Patrick Cavanagh, and will join our lab as a postdoc on July 1.
• Jeremy Freeman, a student at Swarthmore who worked with us last summer, is a Goldwater Scholar for 2007, winning a national competition. The Freeman & Pelli paper on his project from last summer has just appeared in the Journal of Vision special issue on crowding (PDF).
• Momo Araki graduated and won the Psychology Dept. Press Prize for his honor's thesis showing that perception of emotion of body silhouettes is holistic.
• Elizabeth Kierstead's Intel project "Seeing the noise" made her a Finalist in the 2007 New York City Science and Engineering Fair (NYCSEF).
• Marian Zhen's Intel project "Is visual memory verbal?" made her a Finalist in the 2007 New York City Science and Engineering Fair (NYCSEF) and Semi-finalist in the Junior Science and Humanities Symposium (JSHS).
• Alissa Cantone graduated and wrote up her results on the task-dependence of the eccentricity effect, which we hope to continue studying this summer. We are talking to Alec Marantz about the possibility of looking at this through MEG experiments.
• We are collaborating with Dennis Levi (UC Berkley) on crowding and amblyopia. Our paper will appear soon in the JOV special issue on crowding (PDF).
• After ten years of work, "identifying letters" is now published, as the cover article in the December 2006 issue of Vision Research (PDF).
• Our 2006 visit to the Turrell room at the PS1 branch of MoMA was broadcast on National Public Radio. (Produced by Laura Starecheski for 360 Radio.) Click to hear it.
• Our NIH grant R01-EY04432 has been renewed for five years 2006-2011.
• Jake Baron and Yi Cui were semifinalists in the 2006 Intel Science Talent Search.
• Cayla Bergman and Jason Rosenbaltt were semifinalists in the 2006 Junior Science and Humanities Symposium (JSHS).

Updated