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Professor Robert William Kentridge (born 1960) is a British experimental psychologist.
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Professor Robert William Kentridge (born 1960) is a British experimental psychologist.
Robert Kentridge is Professor of Psychology at the University of Durham in the UK. His work is focussed on understanding the relationship between visual perception, visual attention, and consciousness. He has approached these questions by studying neurological patients, by systematically assessing visual abilities using psychophysical methods, using neuroimaging, and, more recently, using virtual reality. His work on attention and consciousness has had notable influence on philosophical views about the basis of consciousness.
In 1984, Kentridge began studying for a PhD at the University of Durham on the role of the neurotransmitter dopamine in neural basis of reinforcement in rats, [1] under the supervision of Professor John Patrick Aggleton. Kentridge obtained his PhD in 1988, and then took up a post-doctoral position with Professor Aggleton, examining the role of the amygdala in memory. [2]
Having become allergic to rats, Kentridge changed direction and began studying early processes in visual attention and eye movements with Professor John Findlay, also in Durham. [3] His expertise in computer programming gaze-contingent eye movement experiments led to a collaboration with Professor Charles A. Heywood and Professor Lawrence Weiskrantz in neuropsychological research that has continued to this day. Since the late 1980s, Kentridge's research has concentrated on the neuropsychology of visual perception and attention, and on the perception of the surface properties of objects. Kentridge has written over 100 academic publications.
In 1999, Kentridge and his collaborators, Heywood and Weiskrantz, were the first to demonstrate that a patient with the neurological condition blindsight was capable of directing his attention to stimuli that he could not see. [4] [5] Despite the fact that attention selectively enhanced the processing of these stimuli, the fact that the blindsight patient still did not see them showed that visual attention and visual consciousness were distinct and separate processes. Subsequently, Kentridge, Nijboer and Heywood showed that the same was true of neurologically normal people. [6]
Kentridge has also conducted research into the neural bases of colour vision through the study of patients with cerebral achromatopsia. He has shown that such patients, despite having no conscious experience of colour, extract colour contrast signals from visual information originating in the retina. Kentridge, Heywood and Weiskrantz have furthermore shown that a patient with an extensive lesion to their striate cortex does not even extract contrast signals and responds behaviourally only to the wavelength of light. This shows that it is only the very final stage of the transformation of retinal signals into estimates of the surface property of colour that gives rise to conscious experience.
Kentridge has used a variety of techniques to further understanding of the specialisation of brain areas for analysis of distinct visually defined properties of objects. In collaboration with David Milner, one of the authors of the influential two visual stream hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-streams_hypothesis and colleagues he used both functional neuroimaging and analysis of the abilities of brain neurological patients with localised damage to the cortex to distinguish the brain areas involved in the perception of colour, shape, texture and glossiness. He has published serious scientific papers which, nevertheless, have a humorous side. A paper investigating the psychological constructs people use in perceiving translucent materials examined peoples judgements of the strength and milkiness of cups of tea. A paper examining the hypothesis that left=handedness might be associated with asymmetric neurological damage, and hence early death, was published in the Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal as it statistically examined causes of death of bowlers in that quintessentially English game, cricket.
Kentridge has been involved in a number of interdisciplinary projects. He is assistant director of the Durham Centre for Visual Arts and Culture at the University of Durham. He has long-standing links with philosophers of mind studying the relationship between attention and consciousness and has been an invited speaker in both psychology and philosophy programmes of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology and the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology and at the annual Rudolf Carnap lectures in Bochum. He is currently collaborating with archaeologists the UK and Germany studying the influence of visual factors in Palaeolithic art.
Kentridge is a member of a number of academic societies, including the International Neuropsychological Symposium. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in their programme on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness.
He is a nephew of the prominent English barrister Sir Sydney Kentridge, and a cousin of the South African artist William Kentridge.
Roger Wolcott Sperry was an American neuropsychologist, neurobiologist, cognitive neuroscientist, and Nobel laureate who, together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel, won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his work with split-brain research. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Sperry as the 44th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Agnosia is a neurological disorder characterized by an inability to process sensory information. Often there is a loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells while the specific sense is not defective nor is there any significant memory loss. It is usually associated with brain injury or neurological illness, particularly after damage to the occipitotemporal border, which is part of the ventral stream. Agnosia only affects a single modality, such as vision or hearing. More recently, a top-down interruption is considered to cause the disturbance of handling perceptual information.
Blindsight is the ability of people who are cortically blind to respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see due to lesions in the primary visual cortex, also known as the striate cortex or Brodmann Area 17. The term was coined by Lawrence Weiskrantz and his colleagues in a paper published in a 1974 issue of Brain. A previous paper studying the discriminatory capacity of a cortically blind patient was published in Nature in 1973. The assumed existence of blindsight is controversial, with some arguing that it is merely degraded conscious vision.
Split-brain or callosal syndrome is a type of disconnection syndrome when the corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres of the brain is severed to some degree. It is an association of symptoms produced by disruption of, or interference with, the connection between the hemispheres of the brain. The surgical operation to produce this condition involves transection of the corpus callosum, and is usually a last resort to treat refractory epilepsy. Initially, partial callosotomies are performed; if this operation does not succeed, a complete callosotomy is performed to mitigate the risk of accidental physical injury by reducing the severity and violence of epileptic seizures. Before using callosotomies, epilepsy is instead treated through pharmaceutical means. After surgery, neuropsychological assessments are often performed.
The pulvinar nuclei or nuclei of the pulvinar are the nuclei located in the thalamus. As a group they make up the collection called the pulvinar of the thalamus, usually just called the pulvinar.
Hemispatial neglect is a neuropsychological condition in which, after damage to one hemisphere of the brain, a deficit in attention and awareness towards the side of space opposite brain damage is observed. It is defined by the inability of a person to process and perceive stimuli towards the contralesional side of the body or environment. Hemispatial neglect is very commonly contralateral to the damaged hemisphere, but instances of ipsilesional neglect have been reported.
Nicholas Keynes Humphrey is an English neuropsychologist based in Cambridge, known for his work on evolution of primate intelligence and consciousness. He studied mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda; he was the first to demonstrate the existence of "blindsight" after brain damage in monkeys; he proposed the theory of the "social function of intellect". He is the only scientist to have edited the literary journal Granta.
Edmund T. Rolls is a neuroscientist and Professor at the University of Warwick.
The two-streams hypothesis is a model of the neural processing of vision as well as hearing. The hypothesis, given its initial characterisation in a paper by David Milner and Melvyn A. Goodale in 1992, argues that humans possess two distinct visual systems. Recently there seems to be evidence of two distinct auditory systems as well. As visual information exits the occipital lobe, and as sound leaves the phonological network, it follows two main pathways, or "streams". The ventral stream leads to the temporal lobe, which is involved with object and visual identification and recognition. The dorsal stream leads to the parietal lobe, which is involved with processing the object's spatial location relative to the viewer and with speech repetition.
Visual agnosia is an impairment in recognition of visually presented objects. It is not due to a deficit in vision, language, memory, or intellect. While cortical blindness results from lesions to primary visual cortex, visual agnosia is often due to damage to more anterior cortex such as the posterior occipital and/or temporal lobe(s) in the brain.[2] There are two types of visual agnosia, apperceptive and associative.
Lawrence Weiskrantz was a British neuropsychologist. Weiskrantz is credited with discovering the phenomenon of blindsight, and with establishing the role of the amygdala in emotional learning and emotional behavior. Blindsight is when a person with a brain injury causing blindness can nevertheless detect, point accurately at, and discriminate visually presented objects.
Somatoparaphrenia is a type of monothematic delusion where one denies ownership of a limb or an entire side of one's body. Even if provided with undeniable proof that the limb belongs to and is attached to their own body, the patient produces elaborate confabulations about whose limb it really is or how the limb ended up on their body. In some cases, delusions become so elaborate that a limb may be treated and cared for as if it were a separate being.
The Riddoch syndrome is a term coined by Zeki and Ffytche (1998) in a paper published in Brain. The term acknowledges the work of George Riddoch who was the first to describe a condition in which a form of visual impairment, caused by lesions in the occipital lobe, leaves the sufferer blind but able to distinguish visual stimuli with specific characteristics when these appear in the patient's blind field. The most common stimuli that can be perceived consciously are the presence and direction of fast moving objects ; in his work these moving objects were described as "vague and shadowy". Riddoch concluded from his observations that "movement may be recognized as a special visual perception".
Anton syndrome, also known as Anton-Babinski syndrome and visual anosognosia, is a rare symptom of brain damage occurring in the occipital lobe. Those who have it are cortically blind, but affirm, often quite adamantly and in the face of clear evidence of their blindness, that they are capable of seeing. Failing to accept being blind, people with Anton syndrome dismiss evidence of their condition and employ confabulation to fill in the missing sensory input. It is named after the neurologist Gabriel Anton. Only 28 cases have been published.
Extinction is a neurological disorder that impairs the ability to perceive multiple stimuli of the same type simultaneously. Extinction is usually caused by damage resulting in lesions on one side of the brain. Those who are affected by extinction have a lack of awareness in the contralesional side of space and a loss of exploratory search and other actions normally directed toward that side.
Michael Steven Anthony Graziano is an American scientist and novelist who is currently a professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University. His scientific research focuses on the brain basis of awareness. He has proposed the "attention schema" theory, an explanation of how, and for what adaptive advantage, brains attribute the property of awareness to themselves. His previous work focused on how the cerebral cortex monitors the space around the body and controls movement within that space. Notably he has suggested that the classical map of the body in motor cortex, the homunculus, is not correct and is better described as a map of complex actions that make up the behavioral repertoire. His publications on this topic have had a widespread impact among neuroscientists but have also generated controversy. His novels rely partly on his background in psychology and are known for surrealism or magic realism. Graziano also composes music including symphonies and string quartets.
Topographical disorientation is the inability to orient oneself in one's surroundings, sometimes as a result of focal brain damage. This disability may result from the inability to make use of selective spatial information or to orient by means of specific cognitive strategies such as the ability to form a mental representation of the environment, also known as a cognitive map. It may be part of a syndrome known as visuospatial dysgnosia.
Prism adaptation is a sensory-motor adaptation that occurs after the visual field has been artificially shifted laterally or vertically. It was first introduced by Hermann von Helmholtz in late 19th-century Germany as supportive evidence for his perceptual learning theory. Since its discovery, prism adaptation has been suggested to improve spatial deficits in patients with unilateral neglect.
Anthony Marcel is a British psychologist who contributed to the early debate on the nature of unconscious perceptual processes in the 1970s and 1980s. Marcel argued in favour of an unconscious mind that "…automatically re-describe(s) sensory data into every representational form and to the highest levels of description available to the organism.” Marcel sparked controversy with his claim to have demonstrated unconscious priming. As of 2013 Marcel was working at the University of Hertfordshire and Cambridge University where his research focused on consciousness and phenomenological experience.
Color tasks are tasks that involve the recognition of colors. Color tasks can be classified according to how the color is interpreted. Cole describes four categories of color tasks:
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