Gipsa-lab (Grenoble) and LNFP (Lille) propose a 12-month postdoctoral position (to start in October or November, 2013) to work on a project LowVision: "Perceptual and cognitive processes after partial or total loss of macular vision: towards a more ecological approach” funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR).
Research will take place in the Grenoble Image Parole Signal laboratory (Gipsa-lab, Grenoble University), France under the supervision of Pr Anne Guérin Dugué and Nathalie Guyader. The project is in collaboration with Laboratoire de Neuroscience Fonctionnelle et Pathologies (LNFP, Lille) under the supervision of Pr Muriel Boucart.
General Context:
People who have lost central vision can rely either on residual central vision or on peripheral vision beyond the scotoma. Yet, little is known about the capabilities of peripheral vision at large visual eccentricities.
Following previous work in M. Boucart team (Naili et al 2006; Boucart et al 2010) in normally sighted young people, the main objective of the project is to further study the level of processing (perceptual, semantic) that can be accomplished at large visual eccentricities. A pilot study, performed in Lille, on normally sighted young observers indicates that performance in a categorization task on animals in scenes improves with practice at large eccentricities (30° and 60°). We do not yet know the mechanisms responsible for this improvement: (a) physiological: does practice sharpens the tuning of cells or (b) perceptual:
resulting from a modulation of strategies to accomplish the task?
On parallel, computational studies were ran in Grenoble to model the human visual perception.
The developed model allows: the extraction of the salient areas (Chauvin et al. 2002; Ho-Phuoc et al 2010, Marat et al., 2009), the extraction of moving objects (Guiron et al. 2007), the extraction of the information of perspective (Massot & Hérault, 2008) and the scene categorization (Guyader et al 2004). For instance, the model works for central vision.
The main aim of the project will be to extend the existing model to large eccentricities and to adjust the model parameters to fit experimental results obtained in Lille.
Expected background and skills:
Applicants must recently have obtained a PhD degree in Computational cognitive modeling, artificial intelligence, signal processing or a closely related field. Skills in experimental psychology will be highly appreciated.
Application:
Please send your application to Dr. Nathalie Guyader (a CV including a publication list, a cover letter) and names of two references. Cette adresse e-mail est protégée contre les robots spammeurs. Vous devez activer le JavaScript pour la visualiser..
Applications can be written in French or English
Gross salary:
2,500 € / month
