Dr. Baker's research is aimed at the long-term objective of understanding human visual perception, particularly low-level mechanisms that are functionally relevant to animals and people in everyday life. Natural scenes in our visual world are filled with objects delineated from their backgrounds not only by simple changes in luminance or colour, but also by differences in contrast, texture or motion. Dr. Baker is interested in how early visual processing detects and utilizes these rich cues to provide a robust perception of "figure-ground" and local depth relationships in the real world. Towards this end, he employs a variety of approaches in both humans and animals, including psychophysics, optical imaging, single unit neurophysiology, and computational modeling.