Welcome to the Brainard Lab

The Brainard Lab studies human vision, both experimentally and through computational modeling of visual processing. Our primary concern is with how the visual system estimates object properties from the information available in the light signal incident at the eye. To study this general problem, we conduct psychophysical experiments to investigate questions such as how object color appearance is related to object surface properties under a wide range of illumination conditions and how color is used to identify objects, and formulate computational models of the results. In addition, we are interested in developing machine visual systems that can mimic human performance and in understanding the neural mechanisms of vision.

Representative Recent Publications

(See Publications for more, or download Brainard’s CV in PDF Format. Or visit Brainard’s Google Scholar’s Page)

Godat, T., Cottaris, N. P., Patterson, S., Kohout, K., Parkins, K., Yang, Q., Strazzeri, J. M., McGregor, J. E., Brainard, D. H., Merigan, W. H., Williams, D. R. (2022). In vivo physiology of foveal retinal ganglion cells in Macaca fascicularis. PLoS One, 17(11), e0278261, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278261.

Singh, V., Burge, J., Brainard, D. H. (2022). Equivalent noise characterization of human lightness constancy. Journal of Vision, 22(5):2, doi: https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.5.2.

Zhang, L., Cottaris, N. P., Brainard, D. H. (2022). An image reconstruction framework for characterizing early vision. eLife, 2022;11:e71132, https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71132.

Barnett, M. A., Aguirre, G. K., Brainard, D. H. (2021). A quadratic model captures the human V1 response to variations in chromatic direction and contrast, eLife, 2021;10:e65590, https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.65590.

Cooper, R. F., Brainard, D. H., Morgan, J. I. W. (2020). Optoretinography of individual human cone photoreceptors. Optics Express, 28, 39326-39339, https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-28-26-39326&id=444748.

McAdams, H., Kaiser, E. A., Igdalova, A., Haggerty, E. B.., Cucchiara, B., Brainard, D. H., Aguirre, G. K. (2020). Selective amplification of ipRGC signals accounts for interictal photophobia in migraine, PNAS, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2007402117.  Download PDF.

Cottaris, N. P., Wandell, B. A., Reike, F., Brainard, D. H. (2020). A computational observer model of spatial contrast sensitivity: Effects of photocurrent encoding, fixational eye movements, and inference engine. Journal of Vision, 20(7):17, https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.20.7.17.

Tuten, W. S., Cooper, R. F., Tiruveedhula, P., Dubra, A., Roorda, A., Cottaris, N. P., Brainard, D. H., Morgan, J. I. W. (2018). Spatial summation in the human fovea: do normal optical aberrations and fixational eye movements have an effect? Journal of Vision, 18(8):6, doi: 10.1167/18.8.6, https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2697364.

Pre-registered Experiments

A list of our preregistrations may be found here.