Dr. Benjamin Vincent

Lecturer

For more information, see Bens Lab Page

Contact Details:
Telephone: (+44)(1382) 388308
Email: Benjamin Vincent

Postal Address:
School of Psychology
The University of Dundee
Dundee
DD1 4HN
Scotland, UK

Biography

I graduated from the University of Sussex in 2000 with a BSc (First Class with honours) in Neuroscience. I continued my doctoral studies there under the supervision of Roland Baddeley and obtained my DPhil in Computational Neuroscience in early 2004. After that I started a postdoc with Tom Troscianko and Iain Gilchrist at the University of Bristol. In July 2007 I took up the post of lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Dundee.

Research Grouping

Language, Cognition and Perception

Research Interests

"How do we decide what to believe and what should we do about it?" I am currently interested in using Bayesian decision theory to gain insight into: visual processing and attention, how we search for items of interest, how we utilise information, how we combine expectations with observations, and also cognitive decision making.

Cognitive psychology broadly sees the brain as an information processor, but is the brain really just an abstract computational device? Brains are physical entities that are under the same physical constraints as everything else and one of these is energy consumption. Perhaps it is the case that being efficient in the use of energy within the brain has formed a powerful evolutionary selection pressure? My investigations have focussed on how energy efficiency shapes the neural organisation of the early visual system and its representations of the world. So far we have shown that if one takes this approach, then considerable insight can be gained into the aeitiology of the early visual system (Vincent & Baddeley, 2003; Vincent et al, 2005).

Publications

Book Chapters

Baddeley, R., Vincent, B., & Attewell, D (2011) Information theory and perception: the role of constraints, and what do we maximise information about?. In G. Terzis & R. Arp (Eds.), Information and Living Systems: Philosophical and scientific perspectives (289-307). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Journal Papers

Vincent, B. (2011) Covert visual search: prior beliefs are optimally combined with sensory evidence, Journal of Vision, 11(13):25, 1-15.
Vincent, B. (2011) Search asymmetries: parallel processing of uncertain sensory information, Vision Research, 51(15):1741-1750.
Agne Taraseviciute, Benjamin T. Vincent, Pepper Schedin, and Peter Lloyd Jones.Quantitative Analysis of Three-Dimensional Human Mammary Epithelial Tissue Architecture Reveals a Role for Tenascin-C in Regulating c-Met Function. Am. J. Pathol. 176(2), 827-838
Vincent, B.T., Baddeley, R.J., Correani, A., Troscianko, T., Leonards, U. (2009) Do we look at lights? Using mixture modelling to distinguish between low- and high-level factors in natural image viewing, Visual Cognition. 17(6-7):856-879.
Tatler, B., Vincent, B.T. (2009) The prominence of behavioural biases in eye guidance. Visual Cognition. 17(6-7):1029-1054
Vincent, B. T., Baddeley, R. J., Troscianko, T., & Gilchrist, I. D. (2009). Optimal feature integration in visual search. Journal of Vision, 9(5):15, 1-11.
Tatler, B., Vincent, B.T. (2008) Systematic tendencies in scene viewing, Journal of Eye Movement Research. 2(2):5, 1-18 (Special Issue: Perception of natural scenes)
Vincent B, Troscianko T, Gilchrist I, (2007) Investigating a space-variant weighted salience account of visual selection, Vision Research, 47(13): 1809-1820
Tatler B, Baddeley R, Vincent B, (2006) The long and the short of it: spatial statistics at fixation vary with saccade amplitude and task. Vision Research, 46, 1857-1862
Vincent B, Baddeley R, Troscianko T, Gilchrist I, (2005) Is the early visual system optimised to be energy efficient, Network: Computation in Neural Systems, special issue on Sensory Coding and the Natural Environment, 16(2/3): 175-190
Vincent B & Baddeley R, (2003) Synaptic energy efficiency in retinal processing, Vision Research 43:1283-1290

Other publications

Vincent, B, (2003) Energy efficiency in sensory systems , DPhil Thesis, University of Sussex
Vincent B (2006) Toward a Bayesian model of teaspoon location, bmj.com, Rapid response to Lim, Hellard, and Aitken, The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute, BMJ 2005; 331: 1498-1500

Additional Information

Invited Talks

2009, University of Southampton external seminar series, Optimal whack-a-mole.
2008, Vision@UCL external seminar, Energy efficient coding of the visual world.
2007, Rank Prize Fund meeting on Representation in Vision, Lake District
2006, University of Dundee, External seminar series. Robotic Active Vision
2005, Rank Prize Fund meeting on Active Vision, Lake District
2005, National Institute for Standards in Technology, Washington DC, USA. Quantifying 3D morphology of mammary epithelial cultures.
2005, Institute for biomedical engineering, University of Pennsylvania, USA, July 2005. Quantifying 3D morphology of mammary epithelial cultures.
2004, Understanding the Brain , Kavali Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California , Santa Barbara , USA . An Overview of Neural Energy Efficiency and its Potential Role in Cognitive Model Building . This presentation was given whilst I spent 5 weeks at a workshop focusing on bringing together theoreticians and experimentalists.

Collaborators