Julie M. Harris

Julie Marie Harris (born 1967) is the Director of Research in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience and a Professor of Vision Science at the University of St Andrews.[3] Her research investigates visual systems and camouflage.[1]

For other people named Julie Harris (disambiguation)|Julie Harris, see Julie Harris (disambiguation).
Julie Harris
Born
Julie Marie Harris

1967 (age 53–54)
Alma materImperial College London (BSc)
University of Oxford (DPhil)
Scientific career
FieldsVision
Eye movements
Perception
Binocular vision[1]
InstitutionsSmith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute
University of Edinburgh
Newcastle University
ThesisStatistical efficiency of human stereopsis (1992)
Doctoral advisorAndrew J. Parker[2]
Websitejulieharrislab.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/julie-harris

Early life and education

Harris was born in Wolverhampton.[4] She initially studied physics at Imperial College London and graduated in 1988.[4] She moved to the University of Oxford for her doctoral studies and earned her Doctor of Philosophy degree under the supervision of Andrew J. Parker in 1992.[2][4] Her doctoral research investigated the efficiency of binocular stereopsis.[2][5] To do this she added binocular disparity noise to a stereogram and compared judgements of depths made by a human with those made by an ideal detector with the correct disparity.[5] She demonstrated that human efficiency was low, particularly when depth profiles were not smooth.[5]

Career and research

Harris joined The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in 1992, where she worked as a postdoctoral fellow for three years.[6][7]

In 1995 Harris was appointed a Lecturer in neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh. She moved to Newcastle University in 1998 where she was made an Associate Professor. In 2005 she joined the University of St Andrews as a Professor of Psychology.

Harris studies visual systems; and in particular what environmental information a given visual system can process and how it makes use of the information. As part of this research Harris uses psychophysical, computational and behavioural approaches, which allow her to understand the processes that underlie human vision and how they connect to motor action. Her early work considered the accuracy of binocular judgements of the direction of motion.[4] Through her work Harris looks to uncover countershading, a means by which animal species disrupt shape perception, how the brain perceives motion, shape and depth and different eye movements.[8][9][10] Her studies of animal camouflage[11] have included monitoring the three-dimensional camouflage of the caterpillar.[12][13] In 2019 Harris and co-workers uncovered how the brain processes three-dimensional information; establishing that the brain separated motion signals into two distinct pathways as they move from the eye to the brain.[14] These signals – of which one arrives quickly and the other slowly – allow for information to be extracted simultaneously from each pathway, and alert the visual system that there is a three-dimensional object.[14] She has shown that people with lazy eye syndrome may be able to process fast three-dimensional motion.[14] Harris looks to apply this understanding to situations where visual communication goes wrong.[14]

Alongside her work on animal camouflage and three-dimensional vision, Harris has investigate the relationship between visual sensory and visuo-motor behaviour during the training of elite athletes.[15] In 2019 she was awarded a Leverhulme Trust grant to study how unusual patterns in complex visual environments may specifically stimulate the visual system.[16]

Selected publications

Her publications[1][3] include;

  • Guidance of locomotion on foot uses perceived target location rather than optic flow[17]
  • Speed discrimination of motion-in-depth using binocular cues[18]
  • Binocular vision and motion-in-depth[19]

References
  1. Julie M. Harris publications indexed by Google Scholar
  2. Harris, Julie Marie (1992). Statistical efficiency of human stereopsis. ox.ac.uk (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford. OCLC 43156534. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.305432.
  3. Julie M. Harris publications from Europe PubMed Central
  4. Howard, Ian P. (2012-01-27). Perceiving in Depth, Volume 3: Other Mechanisms of Depth Perception. Oxford University Press. p. 192. ISBN 978-0-19-987736-2.
  5. Besharse, Joseph; Dana, Reza; Battelle, Barbara Ann; Beebe, David; Bex, Peter; Bishop, Paul; Bok, Dean; D’Amore, Patricia; Edelhauser, Henry (2010-05-27). Encyclopedia of the Eye. Academic Press. ISBN 978-0-12-374203-2.
  6. "Julie Harris | Smith-Kettlewell". ski.org. Retrieved 2019-12-08.
  7. HARRIS, JULIE M.; WATAMANIUK, SCOTT N.J. (1996). "Poor Speed Discrimination Suggests that there is No Specialized Speed Mechanism for Cyclopean Motion". Vision Research. 36 (14): 2149–2157. doi:10.1016/0042-6989(95)00278-2. ISSN 0042-6989. PMID 8776481. S2CID 9138629.
  8. "Professor Julie Harris". Harris: Depth, Shape and Layout. 2013-01-09. Retrieved 2019-12-08.
  9. "Julie Harris on Visual Perception". The Royal Society of Edinburgh. 2017-02-24. Retrieved 2019-12-08.
  10. "The AVA - Promoting Vision Research and its Applications". theava.net. Retrieved 2019-12-08.
  11. "VSS 2017 Meet the Professors". Retrieved 2019-12-09.
  12. Bristol, University of. "October: 3D camouflage | News | University of Bristol". bris.ac.uk. Retrieved 2019-12-08.
  13. Cuthill, Innes C.; Sanghera, N. Simon; Penacchio, Olivier; Lovell, Paul George; Ruxton, Graeme D.; Harris, Julie M. (2016). "Optimizing countershading camouflage". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 113 (46): 13093–13097. doi:10.1073/pnas.1611589113. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 5135326. PMID 27807134.
  14. News, Neuroscience (2019-06-17). "Breakthrough in understanding how human eyes process 3D motion". Neuroscience News. Retrieved 2019-12-09.
  15. "Linking perception to action in sport". Harris: Depth, Shape and Layout. 2013-04-29. Retrieved 2019-12-08.
  16. "Puzzle of what makes objects stand out to be studied". The Times. 2019-04-12. ISSN 0140-0460. Retrieved 2019-12-08.
  17. Harris, Julie M. (1998). "Guidance of locomotion on foot uses perceived target location rather than optic flow". Current Biology. 8 (21): 1191–1194. doi:10.1016/S0960-9822(07)00492-7. PMID 9799736. S2CID 11956015.
  18. Harris, Julie M. (1995). "Speed discrimination of motion-in-depth using binocular cues". Vision Research. 35 (7): 885–896. doi:10.1016/0042-6989(94)00194-Q. PMID 7762146. S2CID 15066738.
  19. Harris, Julie M. (2008). "Binocular vision and motion-in-depth". Spatial Vision. 21 (6): 531–547. doi:10.1163/156856808786451462. PMID 19017481.
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