TeachingUnit co-ordinator for Cognitive Neuroscience (level 3); Unit team for Mind and Brain (level 1); Vision, Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology (level 3).
Research |
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My research interests focus on Inferential Processes in Vision. Vision is an act of interpretation. What we see is not simply an immediately reflection of the physical characteristics of a scene but instead is highly dependent on the processes by which our brain attempts to interpret the scene. In this ‘vision-as-inference’ framework, the knowledge of the probability structure of the visual world is likely to be informative for an efficient visual system, and should substantially alter the responses of visual neurons and our perceptual sensitivity.
I am interested in exploring how this inferential process influences our visual perception (i.e. motion perception, face and object detection), in what ways neurons in the brain undertake inferential computations (i.e. Bayesian inference), and the neural mechanisms of these inferential computations. The research involves a multidisciplinary approach, including psychophysics, eye movement measurements, neuropsychology and brain imaging.
The grant supports are from Leverhulme Trust, Nuffield Foundation and Home Office.
Also see
Current PhD students and research projects
- Anais Racca (Facial communication in human and non-human animals; see recent reports about our research in NewScientist, BBC etc.)
- Charlotte Hall (Differential gaze behaviour towards sexually preferred and non-preferred body images)
- Sophie Hall (Exploitation of natural regularities in earlier visual processing)
- Fiona Williams (Gaze behaviour in response to potential facial and bodily threat cues)
Research Assistants and Post-doc
- Hettie Roebuck (Exploitation of environmental regularities in natural vision, funded by Leverhulme Trust)
- Karen Adams (INSTINCT project funded by Home Office)
Selected Publications ( for full publication list and PDF reprints, see here )
Guo K, Tunnicliffe D, Roebuck H (2010) Human spontaneous gaze patterns in viewing of faces of different species. Perception (in press).
Racca A, Amadei E, Ligout S, Guo K, Meints K, Mills D (2010) Discrimination of human and dog faces and inversion responses in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris). Animal Cognition (in press).
Guo K, Meints K, Hall C, Hall S, Mills D (2009) Left gaze bias in humans, rhesus monkeys and domestic dogs. Animal Cognition 12: 409-418. [pdf]
Pollux PMJ, Guo K (2009) Event-related potential correlates of spatiotemporal regularities in vision. NeuroReport 20: 525-530.
Guo K, Robertson RG, Pulgarin M, Nevado A, Panzeri S, Thiele A and Young MP (2007) Spatio-temporal prediction and inference by V1 neurons. European Journal of Neuroscience 26: 1045-1054.[pdf]
Guo K (2007) Initial fixation placement in face images is driven by top-down guidance. Experimental Brain Research 181: 673-677.[pdf]
Zinke W, Roberts MJ, Guo K, MacDonald JS, Robertson RG and Thiele A (2006) Cholinergic modulation of response properties and orientation tuning of neurons in primary visual cortex of anaesthetized Marmoset monkeys. European Journal of Neuroscience 24: 314-328. [pdf]
Guo K, Robertson RG, Nevado A, Pulgarin M, Mahmoodi S and Young MP (2006) Primary visual cortex neurons that contribute to resolve the aperture problem. Neuroscience 138: 1397-1406. [pdf]
Guo K, Mahmoodi S, Robertson RG and Young MP (2006) Longer fixation duration while viewing face images. Experimental Brain Research 171: 91-98. [pdf]
Guo K, Robertson RG, Mahmoodi S and Young MP (2005) Centre-surround interactions in response to natural scene stimulation in the primary visual cortex. European Journal of Neuroscience 21: 536-548. [pdf]
Roberts MJ, Zinke W, Guo K, Robertson RG, MacDonald JS and Thiele A (2005) Acetylcholine dynamically controls spatial integration in marmoset primary visual cortex. Journal of Neurophysiology 93: 2062-2072. [pdf]
Guo K, Nevado A, Robertson RG, Pulgarin M, Thiele A and Young MP (2004) Effects on orientation perception of manipulating the spatiotemporal prior probability of stimuli. Vision Research 44: 2349-2358. [pdf]
Guo K, Benson PJ and Blakemore C (2004) Pattern motion is present in V1 of awake but not anaesthetized macaque monkeys. European Journal of Neuroscience 19: 1055-1066. [pdf]
Guo K, Robertson RG, Mahmoodi S, Tadmor Y and Young MP (2003) How do monkeys view faces? – A study of eye movements. Experimental Brain Research 150: 363-374. [pdf]