Timothy Brady,
Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego, is the winner of the 2020
Elsevier
/VSS Young Investigator Award.
Prof Brady earned his undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science at Yale University. Under the direction of Aude Oliva, he completed his PhD and then did post-doctoral research with George Alvarez at Harvard University.
Prof Brady uses a combination of behavioral methods, cognitive neuroscience techniques and computational modelling to probe representations in the visual system and the processes by which visual information is encoded in working memory and integrated into long-term storage. He has made numerous surprising discoveries about the extreme fidelity and detail of visual long-term memories for objects and scenes, and has demonstrated how statistical learning and ensemble encoding of features facilitates the maintenance and storage of complex stimuli like natural scenes.
Prof Brady’s work has helped broaden the study of working memory to include richer, more naturalistic stimuli, and repeatedly challenged long-standing assumptions about the nature of visual representations. In a series of highly-cited studies he has shown how remembered objects are stored as groups of distinct parts that can be independently forgotten, and that when multiple items must be remembered, the brain computes summary statistics across the group. Prof Brady is not only a gifted and productive experimentalist—he has also made substantial contributions to the theoretical understanding of visual memory representations through computational modelling, as well as providing numerous useful tools for the community.
Prof Brady will speak at the VSS Awards session at the 2021 meeting.
