research
questions driving my research
How does the brain bind fragments into coherent objects?
The retina delivers a mosaic of disconnected signals, yet we perceive whole objects. I study how the visual system uses statistical regularities — most notably common fate — to decide which local elements belong together and which should be segregated as figure from ground.
How does the visual system parse scenes by motion?
Real environments contain overlapping moving surfaces, and the spatial bottleneck of receptive fields complicates how the brain pulls them apart. I investigate the mechanistic rules that determine when local motion signals fuse into a single global flow versus when they remain as distinct, transparent surfaces.
How do neurons disambiguate overlapping signals?
When two motion directions occupy the same patch of visual space, naive averaging would blur them together. I examine how mechanisms like direction repulsion instead exaggerate angular differences — pushing perceived directions apart so that distinct objects remain clearly segregated in the final percept.
How do cortical areas coordinate to stabilize perception?
Stable perception emerges from recurrent dialogue across the visual hierarchy. I study how feedback between early areas (encoding fine detail) and higher areas (encoding global context) refines noisy neural representations over time and yields a coherent interpretation of ambiguous input.