Dale, Purves

Research Interests:

Ongoing work in the Purves laboratory is aimed at understanding the perception of brightness, color, motion, and depth in a wholly empirical framework. More recently, the group has begun to focus on the perception of musical tones as a means of understanding aspects of auditory aesthetics. The unifying theme of these projects is the hypothesis that percepts are generated according to a wholly empirical strategy that represents the empirical significance of sensory stimuli rather than their physical properties.

Selected Publications:

Howe CQ, Purves D (2002) Range image statistics can explain the anomalous perception of length. Proc Natl Acad Sci 9: 13184-13188.

Yang Z, Purves D (2003) A statistical explanation of visual space. Nature Neurosci 6: 632-640.

Schwartz D, Howe CQ, Purves D (2003) The statistical structure of human speech sounds predicts musical universals. J Neurosci 23:7160-7168.

Purves D, Williams MS, Nundy S, Lotto RB (2004) Perceiving the intensity of light. Psychological Rev 111(1): 142-158.

Yang Z, Purves D (2004) The statistical structure of natural light patterns determines perceived light intensity. Proc Natl Acad Sci 101: 8745-8750.

Howe CQ, Purves D (2005) Natural scene geometry predicts the perception of angles and line orientation. Proc Natl Acad Sci 102: 1228-1233.

Long F, Yang Z, Purves D (2006) Spectral statistics in natural scene predict hue, saturation, and brightness. Proc Natl Acad Sci 103: 6013-6018.

Boots B, Nundy S, Purves D (2007) Evolution of visually-guided behavior in artificial agents. Network: Computation in Neural Systems 18 (1): 1-24.

Ross D, Choi J, Purves D (2007) Musical intervals in speech. Proc Natl Acad Sci 104(23): 9852-9857.

Sung K, Wojtach W.T., Purves D (2009) An empirical explanation of aperture effects Proc Natl Acad Sci, 106 (1): 298-303