Dale Purves

Dale Purves
Born March 11, 1938
Fields Neuroscience
Alma mater Yale University
Harvard Medical School
Website
www.purveslab.net

Dale Purves (born March 11, 1938) is George Barth Geller Professor for Research in Neurobiology at Duke University. He was the Director of the Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders program at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School and Executive Director of the A*STAR Neuroscience Research Partnership from 2009 to 2014 in Singapore. From 2003 to 2009 he was Director of Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. After several years in clinical medicine as a surgical house officer at the Massachusetts General Hospital and as a Peace Corps Physician, he gave up medicine in favor of a career in neuroscience research. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University in 1960 and a Doctor of Medicine from Harvard Medical School in 1964.Following a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard from 1968 to 1971 and in the Department of Biophysics, University College London, from 1971 to 1973. He joined the faculty in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the Washington University in 1971, where he remained until 1990. During that time he studied the development of the nervous system, and was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1989. He came to Duke in 1990 as the founding chair of the Department of Neurobiology,where he became increasingly interested in cognitive neuroscience. Purves's work at Duke has focused on visual and auditory perception (including music), exploring the hypothesis that, as a means of contending with the inverse problem, percepts are generated by a neural strategy that depends on the empirical significance for reproductive success of stimuli created by sensory systems rather than the physical parameters of the real world (see empirical theory of perception).

Empirical theory of perception

According to the wholly empirical theory of perception developed by Purves, R. Beau Lotto and others, perception and sensory function generally must be understood as the outcome of a neural strategy whose goal is to generate appropriate behavior despite the absence of real world measurement. Since the inverse problem precludes direct analysis of objects, this strategy uses the history of the species and individual to associate sensory signals with successful behavior. For example, the perception of lightness is confounded by the fact that a visual image conflates illumination, reflection and transmittance. Because the eye receives only the final product, the visual system cannot logically determine the relative contributions of these factors. Successful behavior and reproduction nonetheless depend on the ability to discriminate these different factors. In an empirical account, the frequency with which stimuli occur determines what humans and other animals actually perceive. This strategy determines perceptual qualities of color, contrast, distance, size, line orientation and angles, and motion.

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