Holly Gerhard Email & Phone Number

Stanford, California

As a research scientist in the Stanford Vision and Neuro-Development Lab, I led brain imaging projects investigating human visual perception. In my work, we were focused on understanding how adults and infants perceive 3D depth on the basis of the different viewpoints of the two eyes.

Tübingen Area, Germany

As a postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Vision & Neuroscience Lab, my objective was to test theoretical predictions about visual processing using behavioral experiments run in human observers.As the first psychologist to join a lab of theoreticians and machine learning experts, I built the complete psychophysical laboratory for well-controlled visual experiments presented on calibrated high dynamic range monochrome displays and wide color gamut specialized LCD displays with eyetracking, precise button response collection, and touchscreen response capability.My projects in the lab were primarily aimed at quantifying how sensitive human observers are to the statistical properties present in natural images. Our work was the first to show that the adult visual system is so well calibrated for natural scenes, that we can even distinguish extremely fine scale details in true photographic images from those from very sophisticated mathematical image models (see article link below).We also examined how well amateur observers can distinguish the stroke styles of expert artists from imitators and showed that they do exceptionally well when information is presented visually in an optimal manner.Other work involved testing visual sensitivity to image compression artifacts.

Tübingen Area, Germany

For the summer term of the Graduate School of Neural Information Processing in 2012, I co-instructed an international master course in Psychophysics & Non-invasive Methods which was cross listed for both the master in Neural Behavioral Science and the master in Neural Information Processing. The course covered all the basic paradigms for behavioral studies of perception and statistical analysis of the data. I presented the material in an accessible and captivating format for the mixed group of international students coming from both technical backgrounds and social science backgrounds.

New York City

As a graduate research scientist supervised by Prof. Laurence Maloney in the Cognition & Perception program at NYU, I studied human visual perception of 3D scenes and metacognition of motor abilities. In the 3D scene research, we developed methods for measuring sensitivity to a variety of dynamic scene cues. In the metacognitive work, we studied how well people can anticipate their ability to perform an upcoming task using a Bayesian updating model to examine their learning abilities.

Phd, Psychology, Program In Cognition & Perception, 3.98/4.00

During my five years at NYU, I earned a Masters degree (MA, 2008) and a PhD (2010) as part of the Psychology Department's doctoral.

Ms In Color Informatics And Media Technology (Visited Program 1 Semester Only), Optics/Optical Sciences, No Grades Received

During my PhD studies at NYU, I spent fall semester 2008 abroad in Granada, Spain to take part in a highly specialized international.

Ba Summa Cum Laude, Psychology, Department Of Cognitive Sciences, 3.95/4.00

Activities and Societies: Campuswide Honors Program, Phi Beta Kappa, Psi Chi (Psychology Honors Society)