NUI Galway

Faculty Member, Psychology

Other Affiliations: Kyushu University, Graduate School of Design

Professor of Applied Perceptual Research

About

Mark was awarded a first-class honours degree in psychology from the Open University (UK, 1988-1994), studied Cognitive Science between 1993 - 1994 at the University of Birmingham and graduated with a Masters and Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of London in 1998. After several years as a social worker, Mark returned to education and, following completion of his PhD at the University of London, took up a research fellow's position at the Universität Leipzig. Immediately prior to his appointment as senior lecturer at NUI Galway Mark was employed as an assistant professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich. He was an Honorary Research Fellow of Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. Mark is a Chartered Scientist, was President of the International Society for Psychophysics and has been commissioned by the EC to advise universities in EU candidate states on curricula and research. In September 2010, Mark was elected to the post of Professor: the Center for Applied Perceptual Research, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan.

Mark's interest is in time and more specifically the timing of psychological processes (or temporal dynamics) at the level of cognitive microstructure. His investigations concern perception, memory and to a lesser extent decision-making. Mark orients this research into psychophysical systems towards an understanding of disease and psychological dysfunction and has recently undertaken research investigating these aspects of dyslexia, blindsight and schizophrenia. He is also interested in the visual aesthetic and develops a research agenda around this topic.

His scientific achievements centre on the formulation of an entirely original research paradigm as a means for determine regularities in process timing alongside the effects of synchronization for visuo-perceptual organization (Elliott & Müller, 1998, 2000, etc.). From this work he was able to firmly establish that the precise spatio-temporal patterning of a subthreshold priming stimulus embedded in a flickering pattern is of influence upon the binding of subsequently presented visual patterns. In fact, and as shown by Elliott, Giersch and Seifert (2006), this is the only paradigm to have shown direct feature - feature binding is measurable through manipulation of the dynamics of (inter)neural mechanisms. The paradigm thus permits direct access to the mechanisms responsible for the integration of component processes or of individual chunks of sensory information in perception, and thus directly concerns the psychological binding hypothesis which has been a topic of discussion since the mid 1980’s. Extensions to the paradigm have clearly shown the value of using visual flicker (intermittent photic driving) as a means for uncovering and measuring the dynamic microstructure of information processing that underlies perception and representation (Becker & Elliott, 2006). Combined with physiological measures such as EEG this seems to provide a means for bridging the gap between the physiological and cognitive levels of description through psychophysical measures of process dynamics.

The use of these techniques has encouraged significant interest amongst researchers in clinical neurosciences, with some promise that the modification of process timing may have tangible benefits for particular pathologies. His published data show evidence for synchronization deficits in dyslexia (Becker et al., 2005). Work in progess shows a very specific restitution of detection function for patterns flickered in the blind field of hemianopic patients, in spite of which those patients have no visible experience of the stimulus. We have also shown that visual hallucinations exhibit patterns of interdependence that suggest perceptual representation to be, of itself, a self organizing system. Both sets of findings have been considered of relevance to clinical studies of schizophrenia (Becker & Elliott, 2006) which attempt to find a means to reduce the pathological episodes: such a means may lie in the careful application of intermittent photic or acoustic stimulation. We have also shown that oscillatory synchrony priming relates to the formation of very short-term visual oscillatory memories and that these memories vary in magnitude according to the complexity of the priming patterns (Elliott & Müller, 2000, Shi & Elliott, in press): a pattern of results that shows stimulus complexity to be coded very early in perception and during the process of feature binding.

The dedicated research space at Galway comprises a suite of two experimental laboratories alongside an adjoining office. The first lab is equipped with a Datacheck 1050 XY plotter with P15 phosphor, capable of image-frame generation with sub-millisecond resolution. The second lab houses a state of the art Cambridge Research Systems ViSaGe graphics controller powering a final generation 22" Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 2070SB monitor and an IRIS Skalar eye tracker. Experimental programs and data analysis are created in house in C or Matlab programming environments. The lab can also make use of 32-channel Brain Amps EEG amplifiers located in the Dept and a 128-channel system, located in a neighbouring facility.

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