Tai Sing Lee is the director. He seeks to understand the organizing principles of the adaptive visual system. He oversees the start-up and development of projects in the laboratory, but strives to foster lab members' leadership roles in the different projects. He is particularly interested in understanding how the visual system learns and adapts, and in the nature of hierarchical computation in the visual system. Matt Smith is interested in modifications to cortical circuits which underly learned changes in visual perception, and in the temporal evolution of responses in visual cortical neurons. He has explored these ideas using single and multiple unit recordings from striate and extrastriate visual cortex. Jason Samonds is interested in exploring how the cortex integrates distributed neural signals that represent distinct and overlapping regions of the visual field. He has explored the statistical properties of the responses of multiple cells simultaneously recorded in striate cortex with microelectrode arrays. His long-term goal is to understand how these properties relate to the flow of information through the visual hierarchy and scene segmentation. Tom Stepleton is interested in the role of contextual inference in higher level object recognition and scene understanding. His current research involves the development of predictive models for how and where objects and other scene elements will appear under varying contextual circumstances. Tom hopes that this work will contribute to our understanding of higher-order areas of visual cortex and how they interact with other conceptual reasoning mechanisms in the brain. Brian Potetz is interested in the statistics of natural scenes (images together with depth, reflectance, illumination data, etc). He examines regularities in these statistics which may shed light on how animals and machines could infer scene properties from images, and how these properties may best be represented in the brain. His current projects involve the statistics of images with coregistered range (depth) images. Ryan Kelly studies the cortical loop between primary visual cortex and higher order areas such as MT. He has examined algorithms for decoding neuronal signals in primary visual cortex, based on single unit recordings. Lei Liu is an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, who has been doing electrophysiology in the lab for the past year.