Jasna Martinovic

How does basic visual information that we sample from the environment in the form of luminance and colour contrast get transformed by our visual system into a representation of our environment? This might seem a trivial question, but the rich world of objects that we experience in everyday life is derived from basic signals about brightness and chromaticity which subsequently get processed by structurally and functionally complex areas of our brain.

My work concerns the neural mechanisms that enable such synergistic processing of luminance and chromatic information. I am particularly interested in how colour and luminance signals feed into mid and higher-level stages of perception, as well as how they are sampled by visual attention. More recently, I also started being interested in categorical effects on colour perception and in colour appearance.

I use a combination of psychophysical and EEG methods in my work. Psychophysics is useful for measuring levels of luminance or colour contrast necessary to perform various visual tasks, or levels of other stimulus properties (e.g. stimulus coherence or density) that lead to certain percepts being formed. On the other hand, EEG provides a window into rapidly occuring neural processes that relate to these visual percepts. By combining them, I hope to extend our knowledge about neural processing of colour.