Dr. Curtis Baker

My lab's research is aimed at the long-term objective of understanding human visual perception, particularly low-level neural mechanisms that perform signal processing that is functionally relevant in everyday life. Natural scenes in our visual world are filled with objects delineated from their backgrounds not only by simple changes in luminance or colour, but also by differences in other attributes such as contrast, texture, or motion. An important goal is to understand how early visual processing detects and utilizes these rich cues to provide a robust perception of "figure-ground" and local depth relationships in the real world. Projects within the lab employ a variety of approaches, including human psychophysics experiments, and computational modeling of psychophysics as well as neurophysiology data.

Recent publications:

1. Ramirez AL, Thompson LW, Rosenberg A, Baker CL Jr.:   Behavioral signatures of Y-like neuronal responses in human vision. Scientific Reports 12:19116 (2022). | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-23293-8
2. St-Amand, D., Baker, C.L. Jr.:   Model-based approach shows ON pathway afferents elicit a transient decrease of V1 responses.  J Neuroscience 43:1920-1932  (2023).   
3. Nguyen, P, Sooriyaarachchi, J., Huang, Q., Baker, C.L. Jr.:   Estimating receptive fields of simple and complex cells in early visual cortex: A convolutional neural network model with parameterized rectification.  PLOS Computational Biology, 20(5): e1012127  (2024). https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012127; 
4. Sooriyaarachchi J, Zhan C, Baker CL Jr.:   Cortical state contributions to response variability in the early visual cortex:  A system identification approach.  PLOS Computational Biology, 21(11): e1013661 (2025).
5. Ramirez AL,  Shakhgildian A, Rosenberg A, Baker CL Jr:   Impaired perception of isoluminant contrast modulation stimuli:   Evidence for a magnocellular pathway mechanism.  J Vision 26(3):13, 1-18 (2026).