Omer Daglar Tanrikulu

My research focuses on visual perception from a computational perspective.

I am especially interested in perceptual grouping, which is an ubiquitous process at different levels of vision. For example, the visual system can efficiently group textures, items, features or objects together to extract the statistical properties of visual scenes. Or, in 3D depth perception, the visual system groups different regions of an image and assigns them figural or ground status in order to determine the relative depth of perceived surfaces.

I have also focused on history effects in vision, such as priming and serial dependence in perceptual judgements. How the visual system processes the incoming visual information (or how perceptual judgments are made) can be influence by the previously encountered visual features or objects, as well as by prior knowledge encoded in the visual system about the visual world.

I investigate such visual processes by conducting psychophysical experiments. I also conduct experiments in Virtual Reality (VR) to test well-known visual phenomena in a realistic environment using naturalistic stimuli provided by the VR technology.

I am also interested in philosophy of cognitive science, particularly on the concept of “mental representation”. My most recent philosophical work focuses on the probabilistic nature of mental representations in visual processing. I am also interested in examining how perceptual grouping processes can help us in resolving the discrepancy between our rich visual conscious experience and the classic findings in vision science showing limited capacity of visual working memory.

To see my most recent publications, please visit my GoogleScholar page:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=jaYJ61kAAAAJ&hl=en