Angela Brown

Dr. Angela M. Brown is an experimental psychologist who studies visual perception and visual development. After a Master's degree in Experimental Psychology (Rutgers University, 1975), she studied visual sensation and perception in the departments of Psychology and Ophthalmology at the University of Michigan, earning her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology in 1981, with a dissertation on human color vision. After a postdoctoral year at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ., she completed her training with three years as a research scientist at the University of Washington.

The current focus of Dr. Brown’s research is visual perception. This research uses behavioral and computational methods to study how people identify, name, and communicate about the colors and other material properties of objects in the visual world. In collaboration with Dr. Delwin Lindsey of the Graduate Program in Vision Science, Dr. Brown has studied color naming and communication about colors among people who speak American English, Japanese, and Somali, and among the Hadza people of Tanzania, one of the last remaining hunger-gatherer societies in the world. Dr. Lindsey and Dr. Brown also investigate the neurophysiology of human color vision using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the human brain.

Another long-term area of research is human visual development, and includes work on visual acuity, contrast sensitivity and contrast discrimination, infant color vision, and infant vernier acuity. That line of research culminated in the development of the Ohio Contrast Cards for use with children and others who cannot read an eye chart and the Newborn Acuity Cards and the Newborn Contrast Cards, for use on full-term and pre-term human infants.