Dirk Bernhardt-Walther

Professor Dirk Bernhardt-Walther is an academic at the University of Toronto, serving as Program Director of the Cognitive Science Program and Department of Psychology. He investigates neural and computational mechanisms underlying high-level sensory perception, focusing on real-world scenes, mid-level vision, and visual aesthetics.

• Education: PhD in Computation and Neural Systems (Caltech, 2006), M.Phil (University of Cambridge)

Research Focus: His lab employs fMRI, MEG, EEG, and GAN-generated stimuli to study scene categorization, perceptual organization, and aesthetic processing. Recent work explores curvature perception, emotion representation in scenes, and neural dissociations between computational and subjective visual metrics.

Laboratory Members: The Bernhardt-Walther Lab includes PhD students like Gaeun Son (scene perception), Charlotte Leferink (scene representation), and Dela Farzanfar (aesthetic processing), alongside postdocs and collaborators.

Advising: Supervises graduate students in projects combining computational modeling, psychophysics, and neuroimaging, particularly those with backgrounds in computer science or cognitive neuroscience.