It is widely believed that the perceptual system of an organism is optimized for the properties
of the environment to which it is exposed. A specific instance of this principle known as the …

The present study examines the extent to which temporal and spatial properties of sound
modulate visual motion processing in spatial localization tasks. Participants were asked to …

Motor preparation is a key component in the control of movement. It allows higher-level
cognitive factors, like expectation, to enhance the speed and accuracy of planned …

Bayesian inference has come to be regarded as the best, statistically optimal, way to deal
with the sensory uncertainty inherent in our natural environment. One way to cope with such …

After becoming disoriented, an organism must use the local environment to reorient and
recover vectors to important locations. A new theory, adaptive combination, suggests that the …

Uncertainty plays a core mechanistic role in computational psychiatric accounts of clinical
disorders. This thesis tests the hypothesis that subclinical anxiety interferes with uncertainty …

Bayesian models of perception propose that the extent to which perception is affected by
prior expectations depends on the precision or variance of the prior distribution–more …

Stimulus color, even irrelevant to the task, has been shown to modulate high-level cognitive
functions, producing different behavioral outcomes. However, the effect of color on lower …

The integration of information across multiple senses is a flexible process shaped by
stimulus-driven and contextual influences. Understanding how these influences interact to …

This thesis proposes nonparametric techniques to enhance unsupervised learning methods
in computational or biological contexts. Representations of intractable distributions and their …