RICHARD PETERS, PhD

Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Centre for Visual Sciences
Research School of Biological Sciences
Australian National University
Canberra ACT
Australia

2008 -	Postdoctoral Fellow	Australian National University
2005 - 2007	ARC Postdoctoral Fellow	Australian National University
2003 - 2004	Postdoc	Macquarie University
2000 - 2003	PhD	Macquarie University
1995 - 1999	Research assistant	University of NSW
1991 - 1994	BA(Hons)	Macquarie University

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My research interests concern the visual ecology of animals. In particular, I have concentrated on the detection and processing of functionally important visual motion events. For many animals motion feature detection plays a vital role in communication, predator avoidance and/or prey detection. Motion vision, therefore, must have been under intense selective pressure, and likely influenced the evolution of these behaviours. More recently I have become interested in animal body patterns, particularly where it serves a role in camouflage.

I draw upon knowledge and techniques used in a range of scientific disciplines (e.g., experimental biology, computer vision, perception and cognition), to understand the visual ecology of a representative (non-human) vertebrate species.

Recent highlights:

- An analysis of how plants move may help to explain the diversity we see in movement-based signal structure (J Comp Physiol A 2008) [ more ]
- lizards take longer to detect movement-based signals when plants are blown by the wind (Biology Letters 2008) [ more ]
- lizards tail flick for longer and switch to intermittent motion when plant motion increases (Current Biology 2007) [ more ]

Last Update: April 4, 2008