Alan Stocker
Assistant Professor of Psychology and
Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE)
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Research Expertise: Visual Perception and Computation | Computational Modeling
Stocker's research interest is to understand how the visual percept of the world is shaped by individual beliefs and expectations about what there is to be perceived. More specifically, research in his laboratory is currently exploring (1) how the statistical properties of our visual environment shape our expectations (i.e. objective expectations), and (2) the degree by which our expectations reflect our own previous perceptual decisions (i.e. subjective expectations). How are these expectations formed? What are the computations by which they are combined with sensory information in order to generate our percepts? And what are the underlying neural processes that perform these computations? His laboratory approaches these questions with the combined effort of theory and experiment. Theory provides the hypotheses necessary to derive models that then can be validated with carefully targeted psychophysical and (through collaboration) physiological experiments. The theory of evolution motivates us to consider vision as an optimal inference problem. Using the framework of probability theory, the goal is to derive meaningful computational models that can quantitatively account for perceptual behavior of human subjects over a wide range of visual tasks.
Education:
PhD Physics 2002 - ETH Zurich
MSc Biomedical Engineering/Material Sciences 1995 - ETH Zurich