Cognitive scientist awarded $500K to study motion perception

Myron Braunstein, professor emeritus of cognitive sciences at UC Irvine, has received a $500,000, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how people perceive motion based on characteristics such as speed and object size. Using motion pictures of real-world scenes, Braunstein and co-investigator George Andersen from UC Riverside – a former student of Braunstein’s – measure participants’ abilities to gauge motion in a 3D environment, based on varying speeds, sizes and other characteristics of moving objects.