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Dr David Brainard

Visiting Fellow, Leverhulme Visiting Professor, RRL Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania

I study visual perception, and consider myself lucky to have been able to spend the bulk of my career studying how we perceive colour: How many colours can we see?  Can we quantify how similar two colours look? Is the colour of an object independent of its shape or the material it is made of, and the lighting under which it is viewed? Do the answers to these questions allow us to draw inferences about the neural representation of colour? To answer these questions I conduct experiments with human subjects and develop quantitative models of the data, often connecting the experiment to normative descriptions of how the brain might extract useful information from the initial sensory encoding of light.

I will be visiting Oxford and Pembroke in Spring 2026 from the University of Pennsylvania, where I hold a faculty position in Psychology. During my visit, I will be collaborating on measurements of and thinking about perception, and I am looking forward to participating in the college community.

Dr David Brainard

Visiting Fellow, Leverhulme Visiting Professor, RRL Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania
Email

I study visual perception, and consider myself lucky to have been able to spend the bulk of my career studying how we perceive colour: How many colours can we see?  Can we quantify how similar two colours look? Is the colour of an object independent of its shape or the material it is made of, and the lighting under which it is viewed? Do the answers to these questions allow us to draw inferences about the neural representation of colour? To answer these questions I conduct experiments with human subjects and develop quantitative models of the data, often connecting the experiment to normative descriptions of how the brain might extract useful information from the initial sensory encoding of light.

I will be visiting Oxford and Pembroke in Spring 2026 from the University of Pennsylvania, where I hold a faculty position in Psychology. During my visit, I will be collaborating on measurements of and thinking about perception, and I am looking forward to participating in the college community.