- Professor Andrew Schofield is a professor in psychology in Aston School of Psychology, Health and Clinical Sciences
- His inaugural lecture will look at how visual perception is not the same for everyone but shaped by health, age and experience
- Professor Schofield also researches computer vision and robotics and is director of the Aston Research Centre for Health in Ageing (ARCHA).
Professor Andrew Schofield, professor in psychology in Aston School of Psychology, Health and Clinical Sciences, will give a public lecture about his research interests on 19 May 2026.
His inaugural lecture, ‘Do You See What I See? Individual Differences in Visual Perception’, will explore the fascinating science behind how we see, and why it differs from person to person.
Extensive research in psychology, neuroscience, and optometry shows that perception is shaped by how the brain processes information, varying across individuals due to health, age, and experience.
Professor Schofield's research is informed by an unconventional transition from engineering to psychology, marking a shift from fixed, rule-based systems to the variability and complexity of human perception. This perspective underpins a focus on individual differences in vision.
Drawing on three case studies; visual stress, perceptual expertise, and age-related change, the lecture illustrates how people can experience the same visual environment in markedly different ways. These differences can lead to discomfort or distortion, enhanced perceptual abilities, or subtle declines that impact everyday functioning without conscious awareness.
Professor Schofield’s first degree was in electrical and electronic engineering from Brunel University, where he became interested in artificial intelligence. He then completed a PhD in communication and neuroscience at Keele University, focusing on neural network models (computer models that mimic the complex functions of the human brain) of texture segmentation in human vision, a process crucial for object recognition and scene understanding. He then returned to Brunel as a research fellow working on neural networks for counting people in images. He later returned to the study of human vision as a research fellow in psychology at the University of Birmingham, during which time he obtained a postgraduate diploma in psychology from the Open University. He joined Aston University as reader in 2018.
At Aston University, as well as researching human visual perception, Professor Schofield also researches the applications of visual perception in computer vision and robotics. The same mechanisms that it is believed humans use to separate illumination and material changes can be used by machines for the same purpose. He is also the director of the Aston Research Centre for Health in Ageing (ARCHA), the mission of which is to understand, predict, prevent and treat age-related degeneration and disease.
Professor Schofield said:
“We think of vision as a simple, automatic process – we just open our eyes and see. By and large we also think everyone else sees the world the same way as we do. But in reality around a third of our cortex is involved in understanding the visual world, and just as every brain is different so is our visual experience.”
The lecture on Tuesday 19 May 2026 will take place at Aston Business School. In-person tickets are available from Eventbrite. The public lecture will begin at 18:00 BST with refreshments served from 17:30 BST. It is free of charge and will be followed by a drinks reception. The lecture will also be streamed online.
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About Aston University
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