William Curran

I completed a BSc in Psychology (1991) and a PhD in Psychology (1994) at University College London. Between 1994 and 2000 I held three post-doctoral research positions with Alan Johnston (UCL), Andy Smith (Royal Holloway), and Oliver Braddick & Jan Atkinson (Visual Development Unit, UCL). In 2000 I was appointed as a Lecturer in the School of Psychology, Queen’s University Belfast; in 2011 I was appointed Senior Lecturer

My interests have spanned a number of areas in visual perception. During my PhD and early post-doc days at UCL my research focused on shape-from-shading and depth cue combination. This was followed by a number of years exploring the processes underlying our perception of motion transparency, as well as investigating perceptual development in early infancy. Other, more recent, vision research has been in the areas of motion transparency, interactions between direction sensitive mechanisms, neural mechanisms underlying adaptation in the human visual system, and local & global motion processing.  My current research focuses on time perception, as well as investigating the role of laughter in social interaction.

My primary teaching role is delivering undergraduate perception lectures (levels 1 - 3).