Jocelyn Cammack

PhD by project - Communication Art & Design

Project title: Visual deception Cinematic exploration of a neurological phenomenon

Jocelyn Cammack, PhD student in the Department of Communications, Art and Design has received support from the Wellcome Trust for her research into visual deception and the beholder in cinematic space, in collaboration with the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at Imperial College, London.

This research project is concerned with the discrepancies and correspondences between what we see and what we think we see. When visual information is unclear or not immediately resolvable, the viewer experiences a state of uncertainty because the perceptual system no longer makes sense. Such circumstances occur regularly in everyday life, particularly for those whose vision is impaired, but can be specifically induced by optical illusions. By provoking systematic perceptual errors, optical illusions reveal the mechanisms of perception and have therefore been used historically by visual neuroscientists in investigations. Borrowing from such neuroscientific approaches, my research uses cinematic optical illusions to expose and dissect the particular eye–brain transactions which underpin the mechanisms of film perception.