Geoffrey Boynton

About

Geoffrey Boynton, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Washington. His research focuses on visual perception and its neural basis, utilizing a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), ERP, and behavioral measurements to study the relationship between neuronal responses in the visual cortex and conscious visual experience. A major goal of his work is to understand attention, specifically how and why some visual stimuli pass through the attentional bottleneck while others do not. He is also interested in the relationship between individual perceptual task performance and the neural responses in cortical areas that represent those stimuli. Boynton's academic background includes a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, obtained in 1994. His research has contributed to understanding cortical plasticity, visual processing, and the neural mechanisms underlying perception. He has collaborated closely with other labs, such as those of Ione Fine and Scott Murray, and his work has been recognized through various awards and publications. His contributions extend to advancing sight restoration technologies, studying the neural basis of visual and auditory perception, and exploring the effects of attention and perceptual learning on brain function.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Cognitive psychology
• Medicine
• Audiology
• Communication
• Engineering
• Biomedical engineering

Selected publications

• A virtual patient simulation modeling the neural and perceptual effects of human visual cortical stimulation, from pulse trains to percepts

  Scientific Reports · 2024-07-29 · 15 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The field of cortical sight restoration prostheses is making rapid progress with three clinical trials of visual cortical prostheses underway. However, as yet, we have only limited insight into the perceptual experiences produced by these implants. Here we describe a computational model or 'virtual patient', based on the neurophysiological architecture of V1, which successfully predicts the perceptual experience of participants across a wide range of previously published human cortical stimulati…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Is there a serial bottleneck in visual object recognition?

  Journal of Vision · 2021 · 14 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Divided attention has little effect for simple tasks, such as luminance detection, but it has large effects for complex tasks, such as semantic categorization of masked words. Here, we asked whether the semantic categorization of visual objects shows divided attention effects as large as those observed for words, or as small as those observed for simple feature judgments. Using a dual-task paradigm with nameable object stimuli, performance was compared with the predictions of serial and parallel…

  DOI

• Factors affecting two-point discrimination in Argus II patients

  Frontiers in Neuroscience · 2022 · 12 citations

  Two of the main obstacles to the development of epiretinal prosthesis technology are electrodes that require current amplitudes above safety limits to reliably elicit percepts, and a failure to consistently elicit pattern vision. Here, we explored the causes of high current amplitude thresholds and poor spatial resolution within the Argus II epiretinal implant. We measured current amplitude thresholds and two-point discrimination (the ability to determine whether one or two electrodes had been s…

  DOI

• Evidence from partially valid cueing that words are processed serially

  Psychonomic Bulletin & Review · 2022 · 11 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  There has been a longstanding debate about whether lexical and semantic processing of words is serial or parallel. We addressed this debate using partially valid cueing, where one of two words is cued. The cue was valid on 80% and invalid on the other 20% of the trials. The task was semantic categorization, and performance was measured by accuracy. The new feature was to limit attentional switching using a postmask of consonants that closely followed the presentation of words. We found a large e…

  DOI

• Improving the reliability and accuracy of population receptive field measures using a logarithmically warped stimulus

  Journal of Vision · 2025-01-03 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  The population receptive field (pRF) method, which measures the region in visual space that elicits a blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal in a voxel in retinotopic cortex, is a powerful tool for investigating the functional organization of human visual cortex with fMRI (Dumoulin & Wandell, 2008). However, recent work has shown that pRF estimates for early retinotopic visual areas can be biased and unreliable, especially for voxels representing the fovea. Here, we show that a log-bar stimu…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• The Effects of Attention in Human Visual Cortex

  NIH · $6.0M · 1999–2020

• NIH Grant F32MH010897

  NIH · $75k

Frequent coauthors

• Ione Fine

  67 shared

• John Palmer

  University of Washington

  33 shared

• Alex L. White

  Barnard College

  26 shared

• David J. Heeger

  New York University

  20 shared

• Michael Beyeler

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  18 shared

• Scott O. Murray

  University of Washington

  17 shared

• Ariel Rokem

  University of Washington

  15 shared

• Melissa Sàenz

  École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

  14 shared

Labs

• Vision and Cognition LabPI

  Vision and Cognition Lab at the University of Washington

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1994

Awards & honors

• Early Investigator Award of the Society of Experimental Psyc…
• Editor to the Editorial Board of the Journal of Vision (2006…

Similar researchers at University of Washington

• Ellen Coveyh-60
• Jonathon Brownh-52
• Shannon Dorseyh-47