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Why We See What We See: The Laboratory of Dale Purves, M.D., DUMC. The Purves laboratory is continuing to study visual perception and its neurobiological underpinnings. Ongoing investigations include understanding the perception of brightness, color, orientation, motion, and depth. The unifying theme of these several projects is the hypothesis that visual percepts are generated according to a wholly empirical strategy that represents to the observer the empirical significance of the stimulus rather than its properties as such. The validity of this theory of vision is being explored by examining the responses of human subjects, the properties of virtual organisms that evolve in defined visual environments, and the response properties of visual cortical neurons in probabilistic terms. The work thus seeks to unite human psychophysics, computer modeling and animal studies to better understand vision. Dale Purves, M.D. George B. Geller Professor. purves@neuro.duke.edu purves lab web site