Martin Banks

Professor, Optometry and Vision Science and Neuroscience Affiliated Professor, Psychology Core Member, UCB/UCSF Graduate Group in Bioengineering 360 Minor Hall mailcode: MC 2020 (510) 642-9341 fax: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it http://bankslab.berkeley.edu/ Membership effective July 1998

Research Interests

Visual space perception, 3d vision, multi-sensory integration, virtual reality, visually guided navigation

Research Summary

We use our sensory systems for environmental information: to guide our actions with respect to goals and obstacles, to categorize and recognize objects, and much more. We are interested in the visual system's capacity to determine the 3d layout of the environment. This is an interesting computational problem because the 3rd dimension has to be inferred from the 2d retinal images. We conduct rigorous behavioral experiments coupled with quantitative modeling to investigate this process. We are also very interested in developing displays that allow the use of 3d cues for medical imaging, operation of remote vehicles, and more. Another important area of research in our lab is the use of other sensory signals, such as touch, hearing, and the vestibular system, to augment 3d perception and object recognition. We are particularly interested in how those signals are combined with visual signals to form coherent percepts.

Selected Publications

C.S. Royden, M.S. Banks, J.A. Crowell. The perception of heading during eye movements. Nature, 1992.

B.T. Backus, M.S. Banks, R. van Ee, J.A. Crowell. Horizontal and vertical disparity, eye position, and stereoscopic slant perception. Vision Research, 1999.

M.O. Ernst, M.S. Banks. Humans integrate visual and haptic information in a statistically optimal way. Nature, 2002.

J.M. Hillis, M.O. Ernst, M.S. Banks, M.S. Landy. Combining sensory information: Mandatory fusion within, but not between, senses. Science, 2002. 

M.S. Banks, S. Gepshtein, M.S. Landy. Why is spatial stereoresolution so low? Journal of Neuroscience, 2004.

D. Vishwanath, A.R., Girshick, M.S. Banks. Why pictures look good when viewed from the wrong place. Nature Neuroscience, 2005.