Jack Pettigrew
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John Douglas ("Jack") Pettigrew (born 1943) is Emeritus Professor of Physiology and Director of the Vision, Touch and Hearing Research Centre at the University of Queensland in Australia.
Professor Pettigrew's research interest is in comparative neuroscience. He has studied a variety of different birds and mammals with modern neural tracing techniques to unravel principles of brain organization. Special emphasis is placed on the visual, auditory and somatosensory systems. [1]
Professor Pettigrew was the first person to clarify the neurobiological basis of stereopsis when he described neurones sensitive to binocular disparity. His recent studies indicate a role for non-visual pathways in the phenomenon of developmental plasticity during the postnatal "critical period". He discovered that owls have independently evolved a system of binocular neurones like those found in mammals. Recent work uses binocular rivalry as an assay for interhemispheric switching, whose rhythm is altered in bipolar disorder. [2]
