Freddy Kamps
Lecturer
- Psychology
- School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences
Contact details
- Email: fkamps@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
Room F17, Psychology Building
- City
- 7 George Square, Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9JZ
Availability
I am happy to arrange meetings by appointment. Please e-mail me at fkamps@ed.ac.uk to arrange a day and time.
Background
I earned a BA in Neuroscience from Macalester College and a PhD in Psychology from Emory University (advisor: Daniel Dilks). I then worked as a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (advisors: Rebecca Saxe and Nancy Kanwisher) before starting as a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh in August 2024.
Qualifications
PhD in Psychology
BA in Neuroscience
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
Yes
Research summary
Human vision allows us to flawlessly navigate the local visual environment, or “scene”. This task is far from trivial, yet humans learn to do it without instruction, easily surpassing performance of state-of-the-art computer vision systems. How? My research explores human visual scene perception as test case for fundamental questions about how human cognition is functionally organized and how that organization arises over development. I focus on three big questions: 1) How is visual scene information represented in adult brains? 2) How do scene representations develop, from birth to adulthood? And 3) How does experience drive change? I tackle these questions using a variety of methods (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); infant looking time methods; immersive virtual reality (VR) stimulus presentation) in a variety of populations (e.g., from typically developing adults to neonates, to individuals with Williams syndrome). Ultimately, my work paints a picture of how the human brain solves challenging computational problems through the interplay of genetics, development, and experience.