Professor Charles Leek PhD, CPsychol, AFBPsS FHEA

Our work is funded by grants from: ESRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, British Academy, Royal Society, NHS (BCUHB), Welsh Assembly Government, British Psychological Society, Experimental Psychology Society & Welcome Trust.

The goal is to further understanding of the neurobiological and computational foundations of high-level vision, attention and motor control systems in the human brain. We use state-of-the-art methods in perceptual psychophysics, eye tracking, event-related potentials (ERPs), functional brain imaging (e.g., fMRI), brain stimulation techniques (e.g., TMS), computational modeling and neuropsychological studies of individuals with acquired cognitive impairments arising from strokes and degenerative illnesses such as Parkinson's disease (PD). We also work with machine vision and robotics collaborators on the development of biologically-inspired robotics and machine vision applications.

We have a range of ongoing fundamental basic research programmes investigating:

** The neurobiological systems underlying vision, attention and prehensile movement; and the impact of impairment to these systems on human vision, attention and motor control.
** The organisation and structure of the neuro-computational architecture supporting three-dimensional object recognition.
** Individual differences in, and predictors of, resilience to effects of chronic stress on the functional efficiency of the human endogenous and exogenous attention systems.
** The development of biologically-inspired deep learning approaches (e.g., deep neural networks) to understanding human vision (e.g., image classification).

Some of our ongoing translational projects:

** The development of hypothesis-driven non-pharmacological interventions for the treatment of motor disability in Parkinson's disease patients.
** Individual differences in, and predictors of, resilience to stress-related failures of human attention.

Please feel free to contact the lab for more information (or follow the link above to the Lab Webpage).