alex white
Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar
Media Profile
"The perception of time is a critical aspect of human experience, yet it is poorly understood. Simple, attention-grabbing visual stimuli can cause distortions in the perceived rate of time, perhaps due to changes in sensory information processing rates."
Alex White is one of fifteen Americans to be granted a Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship in 2007. He will carry out research towards a Master’s degree in psychology on the perception of time at the University of Sydney. Alex is a currently a student at Yale University where he will graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Cognitive Science in May 2007.
Alex will arrive in Australia in July to commence his twelve month scholarship studying with Dr Alex Holcombe, a leading researcher in the field of visual psychophysics. They intend to carry out experiments that, using behavioural methods on human subjects, will tell them something about the nature of time perception and the visual feature binding the brain.
“There is one cognitive function, perhaps the most salient component of our mental experience, that until recently has not been studied with scientific rigor: the perception of time,” explains Alex. “In collaboration with Dr Holcombe I plan to develop a new method to explore the cognitive processes that determine the temporal aspects of visual experience. This study will help answer important questions about our perception of time. Why is it variable? What sorts of brain processes give rise to it?”
“If, during a subjective temporal slowing, binding happens in objectively shorter intervals, then the mechanism of time perception is in fact related to rates of sensory information processing. Such a result would also indicate that the rate of feature binding is variable, which may be a clue to how the brain manages to create a coherent percept out of representations in separate brain regions that operate out of sync.”
When he returns to the U.S. Alex plans to enrol in a PhD program in psychology and hopes to continue to study visual perception. He would like to use computation modelling to develop new theories of the neural basis of awareness.
During his studies Alex has been recognised with the Bausch and Lomb Physics Award (2002), AP Scholar With Distinction Award ( 2003), the Richter Fellowship (2005) and the Yale College Dean’ Fellowship (2006).
Alex’s other study interest is photography, which he has studied since middle school. In his early years at Yale he served as editor for an art photography magazine and for the daily newspaper. However his interest in vision became scientific after taking classes in neurobiology, psychology, philosophy and computer science.