معرفی
Professor Branka Spehar is a distinguished researcher in visual perception at the University of New South Wales' School of Psychology. With a PhD in Experimental Psychology from Rutgers University (1994), her career spans decades of groundbreaking research on how humans process visual information.
Her research interests encompass lightness and color perception, perceptual organization, attentional capture, and the perceptual foundations of aesthetic experience. She investigates how neural mechanisms process visual information, how these processes develop from infancy through adulthood, and how they relate to the statistical properties of natural images. Her work bridges experimental psychology, neuroscience, and aesthetics.
Professor Spehar's recent publications demonstrate her focus on fractal properties in visual perception, cross-cultural emotion recognition, and the relationship between visual form and aesthetic experience. Her research employs diverse methodologies including fMRI, EEG, behavioral experiments, and computational analysis of visual stimuli. She has secured significant funding including ARC Discovery Grants for projects on aesthetic appreciation and the relationship between natural form and the human brain.
She actively supervises PhD and honors students, maintaining a robust research program that explores both fundamental visual processes and their applications to real-world contexts. Her laboratory investigates how context affects perception, how fragmented visual information is integrated into global percepts, and how aesthetic preferences relate to underlying neural mechanisms.
