Robert Randolph Blake

Centennial Professor
Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences
Research Professor of Psychology
Professor of Psychology Emeritus

Blake studies human visual perception, including binocular vision, motion perception and perceptual organization. His most recent research has focused on: i) the roles of knowledge and intention on the resolution of perceptual ambiguity, ii) role of temporal structure in visual grouping, iii) perception of biological motion, and iv) synesthesia. He has published neural models of perceptual bistability and of structure from motion. For the past ten years, Blake has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study brain activation patterns associated with visual perception, with his current work focusing on biological motion and binocular rivalry. He has also published work on visual imagery, bisensory integration, working memory, and art and the brain. In collaboration with colleagues, he has extended his research to include individuals diagnosed with autism, Williams syndrome, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. His work is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Lab Website

Representative Publications

Brascamp, J., Sterzer, P., Blake, R. & Knapen, T. (2018) Multistable perception, and the role of frontoparietal cortex in perceptual inference, Annual Review of Psychology, 69, 77-103. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010417-085944 (Featured in news story in Knowable Magazine)

Noel, J.-P., Simon, D., Thelen, A., Maier, A., Blake, R. & Wallace, M. (2018) Probing electrophysiological indices of perceptual awareness across unisensory and multisensory modalities. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 30, 814-828. https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn_a_01247

Han, S., Alais, D. & Blake, R. (2018) Battle of the Mondrians: Investigating the role of unpredictability in continuous flash suppression. I-Perception. 9(4), 1-21.

Tadin, D., Park, W.J., Dieter, K.C., Melnick, M.D., Lappin, J.S. & Blake, R. (2019) Spatial suppression promotes rapid figure-ground segmentation of moving objects. Nature Communications. 10(1): 2732. Open Access, News story

Blake, R., Goodman, R., Tomarken, A.T. & Kim, H.Y. (2019) Individual differences in continuous flash suppression: Potency and linkages to binocular rivalry dynamic. Vision Research, 160, 10-23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2019.04.003

Cha, O. & Blake, R. (2019) Evidence for neural rhythms embedded within binocular rivalry. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116 (30) 14811-14812. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1905174116

Cha, O., Son, G., Chong S.C., Tovar, D. & Blake, R. (2019) Novel procedure for generating continuous flash suppression: Seurat meets Mondrian, Journal of Vision, 19(14):1, 1–22,

Wen, P., Opoku-Baah, C., Park, M. & Blake, R. (2020) Judging relative onsets and offsets of audiovisual events. Vision, 4 (1), 17; https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5150/4/1/17/htm

Cha, O., Blake, R. & Gauthier, I. (2020) The role of category- and exemplar-specific experience in ensemble processing of objects. Attention, Perception & Performance (special issue on ensemble processing. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-020-02162-4

Ng, C.J., Blake, R., Banks, M.S., Tadin, D. & Yoon, G. (2021). Seeing the world like never before: Human stereovision through perfect optics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(23): e2100126118. https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/23/e2100126118.full.pdf

Blake, R. (2022) The perceptual magic of binocular rivalry. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 31(2), 139-146. doi:10.1177/09637214211057564

Alais, D., Coorey, J., Blake, R., Davidson, M.J. (2023) tCFS: A new ‘CFS tracking’ paradigm reveals uniform suppression depth regardless of target complexity or salience. eLife 12:RP91019.

Park, M., Blake, R. & Kim, C.Y. (2024) Audio-visual interactions outside of visual awareness during motion adaptation. Neuroscience of Consciousness, Jan 2024,1,niad027, https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niad027.