Two graduate students from the Living Matter lab of Dr. Vijay Balasubramanian have moved into research on human perception. John Briguglio examines whether our sensory apparatus is tailored to our natural environment-- specifically, the textures of the natural landsape of Botswana. And Xuexin Wei is studying spatial representation in the human visual response; neurons in the Entorhinal Cortex respond to visual stimuli in lattice-like patterns, and mathematical models indicate that different scales of these lattices would make for efficient representations of space.
Read about their research in SASFrontiers.
More details about Penn's research on vision and the Botswana landscape can be found at ScienceNow.