I conduct behavioural experiments to study the relation between visual perception and the properties of the nervous system. I focus on the consequences for perception of three properties of neural processing.

First, its slowness. When light stimulates the retina, the resulting activity in some cortical does not occur until more than 0.1 seconds later. This poses a problem for interacting with our fast-changing environments. For example, if neural delays are uncorrected, we should perceive moving objects in locations that lag the physical location in the environment. An intriguing possibility is that the visual system compensates for these delays by using information from the past to predict the future.

Second, neural processing is modular. Not only are auditory and visual processing segregated, but also aspects of different attributes such as colour and motion are processed separately. This raises the question of how the brain binds disparate representations to create a coherent perceptual experience.

Third, neural processing is noisy. The response of the brain to the same stimulus presented twice is quite different. It is poorly understood how visual performance can be as high is it for some tasks.