Frederick A. A. Kingdom

Frederick A. A. Kingdom is a Professor in the Department of Ophthalmology at McGill University's Faculty of Medicine, focusing on Perception, Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience. His research explores the interplay between early visual feature detection (edges, bars) and intermediate stages forming contours, textures, and surfaces through spatial vision, color vision, stereopsis, texture perception, brightness/lightness perception, and transparency studies.

• Email: fred.kingdom@mcgill.ca

Key research domains include:

• Perceptual Mechanisms: Lateral inhibition, contrast normalization, spatial bandpass filters, and their role in brightness/lightness perception and illusions like simultaneous brightness contrast.
• Color Vision: Red-green vs blue-yellow system distribution, chromatic contrast requirements for stereopsis, color-based depth processing limitations, and color-shading effects that parse surfaces vs illumination.
• Texture Analysis: Detection thresholds for orientation/frequency/contrast modulated textures, co-circularity in texture perception, and texture statistical sensitivity (e.g., kurtosis importance).
• Shape Processing: Shape-frequency/shape-amplitude aftereffects, global vs local shape coding, and contour inflection adaptation.

His work combines psychophysics, fMRI, image processing, and computational modeling to dissect visual system architecture, particularly how color and luminance signals are integrated/separated in early cortical processing.