The Science of Human Colour Perception
and Perceptual Development
Lab Members
Professor Anna Franklin
Anna leads the Sussex Colour Group and Baby Lab. Before coming to Sussex she did an Undergraduate degree at the University of Nottingham and a PhD at the University of Surrey. She set up a Baby Lab in the second year of her PhD to investigate infant colour perception, and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Economic and Social Research Council to continue this research. She was then appointed as faculty at the University of Surrey where she stayed until taking up a Visiting Scholarship at the University of Califorina, Berkeley in 2010. She was promoted to Professor at the University of Sussex in 2015. She has been awarded Starter, Proof of Concept and Consolidator grants from the European Research Council, and her research has also been funded by industry.
Dr. John Maule
John is a Lecturer in the School of Psychology. He completed his PhD in 2015, investigating how well people can visually average sets of different colours. John’s current research interests include quantifying the “visual diet” in terms of colour, chromatic image statistics and aesthetics, hyperspectral imaging, adaptation, ensemble perception, and colour perception in autism. This involves techniques including psychophysics, behavioural experiments, eye-tracking, and image analysis.
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Dr. Alice Skelton
Alice joined the Sussex Colour Group & Baby Lab in 2011 while completing her masters in Cognitive Neuroscience. Alice's PhD focused on infant colour perception, characterising infant colour perception in the first year of life for aspects of colour such as colour categorisation and infant sensitivity to natural scene statistics. As a post-doctoral researcher Alice is investigating how our perception of colour relates to the statistics of natural scenes, and how we tune into the unique chromatic make-up of our environment across the developmental lifespan.
Ian Pennock
Ian completed his undergraduate degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences focusing on Cognitive Science, Psychology, Philosophy and Statistics at University College Roosevelt in the Netherlands. He then completed a double MSc degree in Cognitive Neuroscience and AI from the University of Osnabrueck, Germany and the University of Trento, Italy. His doctoral research is analysing the 7T neuroimaging Natural Scenes Data Set to identify colour biased regions of the brain.
Alex Swartz
Alex completed a BSc in Neuroscience with Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex in 2017, before moving to the University of Amsterdam to study for an MSc in Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Shortly after finishing his MSc in 2019, Alex returned to Sussex to work towards his PhD as part of the COLOURMIND project. In his doctoral research Alex is investigating the role of chromatic and spatial natural scene statistics in aesthetics and their representation in the brain. Alex is also using virtual reality to investigate how we perceptually adapt to chromatic scene statistics.
Philip McAdams
Philip joined the Sussex Colour Group & Sussex Baby Lab in 2021 as a doctoral researcher after completing his MA in Psychology from the University of Aberdeen. Philip is investigating visual development and natural scene statistics funded partly by the COLOURMIND project. Working in collaboration with baby product company, Etta Loves, Philip is investigating infant sensitivity to natural scene statistics (such as colour and pattern), and what role experience with these statistics may play on visual tuning and the development of aesthetic preferences.
Taysa-Ja Newman
Taysa is currently an Undergraduate student undertaking her year’s placement at the lab. She works as a research assistant on a multitude of studies focusing on both infant visual perception and adult colour vision. While working at the lab, Taysa has developed a keen interest in both developmental psychology and psychophysics
Megan Chambers
Megan is an undergraduate Psychology student with a keen interest in developmental psychology. She is working in the Sussex Baby Lab as a research assistant for her placement year, and is running Baby Zoom iPad studies to investigate how babies perceive colour and pattern.
Yasmin Richter
In the midst of her undergraduate Psychology degree, Yasmin is working as a research assistant in the Sussex Colour Group & Baby Lab in her placement year. Yasmin previously worked as a teaching assistant at a primary school for children who are hard of hearing, which is where she first found an interest in developmental research. The following years spent studying psychology have further shifted her interest onto individuals' perception, particularly the visual perception of colour.
We collaborate and work closely with several other colleagues at the University of Sussex, shown below. We also regularly collaborate with research teams at other institutions.
Dr. Jenny Bosten
Jenny leads the University of Sussex Vision Lab: https://jennybosten.wixsite.com/visionlab, and collaborates with the Sussex Colour Group and Baby Lab on many projects such as ColourSpot and COLOURMIND. Jenny did an undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge in Natural Sciences with a specialism in neuroscience. She stayed at Cambridge to complete her doctoral training with Professor John Mollon at the Department of Experimental Psychology, and then became a Research Fellow in Neurosicence at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (2008-2010 and 2012-2014). She was a post-doctoral researcher at UC San Diego in the lab of Professor Donald MacLeod (2010-2012). She joined the University of Sussex as Lecturer in 2015, and became a Senior Lecturer in 2018.
Dr. Chris Racey
Chris is a research technician within Sussex Neuroscience and his background is in fMRI and vision. He works with the Sussex Colour Group on experiments investigating the cognitive neuroscience of colour, primarily in the experimental design and analysis of neuroimaging studies.