Anne Sutter

Professor Emerita

Education

Ph.D., University of Oregon
Specialty: Experimental Psychology

Research Interests

In my research, I use what is known about the basics of visual processing to figure out how the brain might go about perceiving objects in the world. I am particularly interested in the way texture information is used by the visual system. Texture is an important feature of objects; without it, representations of objects do not look real. I have worked to determine the processes by which adjacent areas of different texture are perceived to be distinct regions (different objects) in a visual scene. Most of this research has been conducted with the goal of explaining "texture segregation" at the earliest possible level of the visual system. Questions that I plan to address in future experiments include: What constitutes a "texture" in perception? What role does attention play in whether a stimulus is perceived as a texture or a collection of objects? To what extent does the experimental task determine the perception of the stimulus in studies of texture segregation and visual search?

Professional/Community Affiliations

Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
Optical Society of America

Courses Taught

PSYC/BIOL 240 Psychology and Biology of Perception
PSYC 304 Statistics
PSYC 435 Information Processing
PSYC 480 Graduate Statistics

Publications/Research Listings

Graham, N., & Sutter, A. (2000). Normalization, compressiveness, and expansiveness in simple (Fourier) and complex (Non-Fourier) texture channels. Vision Research, 40, 2737-2761..

Sutter, A., & Hwang, D. (1999). A comparison of the dynamics of simple (Fourier) and complex (non-Fourier) mechanisms in texture segregation, Vision Research, 39, 1943-1962.

Graham, N., & Sutter, A. (1998). Spatial summation in simple (Fourier) and complex (non-Fourier) texture channels, Vision Research, 38(2), 231-257.