Prof Roger Watt FRSE

Job Title

Professor of Psychology.

Leverhulme Research Fellow 1/10/08 - 30/09/10

University of Nottingham Special Professor of Psychology

Administrative Duties 

Final year co-ordinator (Psychology single hons programmes)

Careers Advisor for Psychology 4th year single honours students

Peer-mentoring contact (see: http://www.steer.stir.ac.uk/index.php for details of the scheme).

Research interest lies in 3 main areas of visual perception:

1). I am working on an image description language, which can be applied to real images and then used to simulate the human performance of a wide range of visual tasks. This language comprises elementary descriptors of strictly local image patterns, combined by grouping operators into multi-local patterns. The elements and the grouping operators are all dynamical and creative.

2). I am interested in the fundamental question of what spatial relations underlie our perception of visual space: how the apparently continuous space within which we see things is constructed from a discrete set of measured spatial relations between elements in the image description langauge.

3). I am interested in the question of how the image description language is calibrated against properties of the world.

I am a member of the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Area.

Final Year Dissertation Project

Click on this to download a document that describes my work on some patterns that are not visible.

Regular Patterns that Cannot be Seen

Research Monographs

Watt RJ (1988). Visual Processing: Computational, Psychophysical and Cognitive Research. Lawrence-Erlbaum Associates, Hove UK. Amazon

Watt RJ (1991) Understanding Vision. Academic Press, London   Amazon (Note especially the review)

Selected Old Stuff

Watt RJ and Andews DP (1981). APE: Adaptive Probit estimation of psychometric functions. Curr Psychol Reviews 1, 205-214. PDF

Recent Publications (Selected)

Watt RJ and Ash RL (1998). A Psychological Investigation of Meaning in Music. Musicae Scientiae, 1, 33-53. PDF

Watt RJ and Phillips WA (2000) The function of dynamic grouping in vision. Trends in Cognitive Science, 4, 447-454. PDF

Watt RJ (2001) Visual perception and typography. Typographic, 57, 18-21.

Watt RJ (2002) Wrong signals. Trends in Cognitive Science, 6, 267-268 PDF

Quinn SCM and Watt RJ (2004) Tempo judgements for music. . In S. Lipscomb, R. Ashley, R. Gjerdingen & P. Webster (eds), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition. ICMPC, Evanston. ISBN 88-7395-155-4  PDF

Quinn SCM and Watt RJ (2006) The perception of tempo in music. Perception, 35, 267-280. PDF

Watt RJ and Quinn SCM (2006) Analysis of local and global timing and pitch change in ordinary melodies. In M. Baroni, A. Addessi, R. Caterina & M. Costa (eds), Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition. ICMPC, Bolgna. ISBN 1-876346-50-7 PDF

Quinn SCM and Watt RJ (2006) The perception of local and global timing in simple melodies. In M. Baroni, A. Addessi, R. Caterina & M. Costa (eds), Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition. ICMPC, Bolgna. ISBN 88-7395-155-4 PDF

Watt RJ, Craven BJ, Quinn SCM (2007) A role for eyebrows in regulating the visibility of eye gaze direction. Quart. J. Exp. Psychol., 60, 1169-1177. PDF

Watt RJ and Quinn SCM (2007) Some robust higher level percepts in music. Perception, 36, 1834-1848. : PDF

Watt RJ and Quinn SCM (2008) It depends what you do in the laboratory British Journal of Psychology, 99, 351–354 : PDF

Watt RJ, Ledgeway T, Dakin S (2008) Families of models for Gabor paths demonstrate the importance of spatial adjacency. Journal of Vision, http://journalofvision.org/8/7/23/ : link

Watt RJ and Dakin S (2008) The utility of image descriptions in the inital stages of vision: a case study of printed text. British Journal of Psychology, in press

Dakin S and Watt RJ (2009) Biological “bar codes” in human faces. Journal of Vision, 9(4):2, 1-10, http://journalofvision.org/9/4/2/, doi:10.1167/9.4.2. link                see also: press reports