Dr. Remy Allard (Associate Researcher UPMC)

Vision Institute
Aging in Vision and Action Lab
CNRS – INSERM – University Pierre&Marie Curie
17, rue Moreau F-75012 Paris, France
Phone: +33 (0)1 53 46 26 56

email:

Research interests

Motion perception. Despite more than 3 decades of research, there is no consensus on the existence of the motion systems enabling motion perception. It is well accepted that there are at least two qualitatively distinct motion systems: a low-level, energy-based system sensitive to luminance motion and a high-level, feature tracking system that attentively tracks features defined by various attributes such as luminance, color or texture. However, many researchers also suggest the existence of dedicated low-level, energy-based motion systems sensitive to color- and/or texture-defined motion. My goal is to determine the motion systems enabling motion perception.

Using visual noise. Noise is widely used to study visual functions and it is generally assumed that the same processing strategies (i.e., mechanisms) operate whether the dominant noise source comes from the observer (internal noise) or the stimulus (external noise). However, I recently found conditions under which the processing strategy drastically changes depending on the noise source, which violates the noise-invariant processing assumption. I am now trying to determine the conditions under which the processing strategy changes.

Vision & Aging. Healthy aging alters all processing levels of the visual system, such as optics of the eye, retinal processing, early pre-attentive processing, and high-level attention-based processing. These alterations affect many visual functions such as contrast sensitivity, motion perception and visual attention. Although many effects of aging on visual functions are known, the specific functional and neurobiological factors responsible for age-related sensitivity loss in various visual functions remain unknown. I am investigating which underlying factors are responsible for age-related visual losses.

Keywords: motion perception, contrast sensitivity, noise paradigm, internal noise, aging

Biography

After completing a bachelor’s degree in computer science at the Université de Moncton, Canada, I studied texture and motion perception as a master student in vision science and a PhD student in experimental psychology at the Université de Montréal under the supervision of Jocelyn Faubert. I continued my training with a 2-year postdoc with Partrick Cavanagh at the Université Paris Descartes studying the use of visual noise to characterize visual processing. My second postdoc was at the Université de Montréal with Jocelyn Faubert, where I investigated motion perception, noise paradigms and the effect of aging on visual perception. I am now a member of the Aging in Vision and Action team (dir. A. Arleo) at the Institut de la Vision, Paris, France, where I am responsible for the research axis Aging & Visual Perception in the Chair SilverSight (ANR-Essilor).

 

CV (pdf): [ download ]

 

Publications

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2004

  1. Allard R and Faubert J (2004) Neural networks: different problems require different learning rate adaptive methods. In Dougherty, Edward R. and Astola, Jaakko T. and Egiazarian, Karen O., editors, Image Processing: Algorithms and Systems III, pages 516-527, SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5298.
  2. Faubert J and Allard R (2004) Effect of visual distortion on postural balance in a full immersion stereoscopic environment. In Woods, Andrew J. and Merrit, John O. and Benton, Stephen A. and Bolas, Mark T., editors, Stereoscopic Displays and Virtual Reality Systems XI, pages 491-500, SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5291.