The Backus Lab does basic and clinically relevant research on visual perception and perceptual learning. Current work (funded by the NIH, NSF, and Human Frontier Science Program) focuses on the adult visual system's ability to learn from experience. This learning can affect the way things look: we study how people learn to use new visual cues for seeing (cue recruitment), how they get better at precise vision tasks (improved sensitivity with practice), and changes to the neural substrates that support binocular vision.

1. Backus, B.T. (2009). The Mixture of Bernoulli Experts: a theory to quantify reliance on cues in dichotomous perceptual decisions. J Vis, 9, 6 1-19.
2. Wilmer, J.B., & Backus, B.T. (2009). Genetic and environmental contributions to strabismus and phoria: evidence from twins. Vision Res, 49, 2485-2493.
3. Haijiang, Q., Saunders, J.A., Stone, R.W., & Backus, B.T. (2006). Demonstration of cue recruitment: Change in visual appearance by means of Pavlovian conditioning. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 103, 483-488.
4. Backus, B.T., Fleet, D.J., Parker, A.J., & Heeger, D.J. (2001). Human cortical activity correlates with stereoscopic depth perception. J Neurophysiol, 86, 2054-2068.
5. Backus, B.T., Banks, M.S., van Ee, R., & Crowell, J.A. (1999). Horizontal and vertical disparity, eye position, and stereoscopic slant perception. Vision Res, 39, 1143-1170.