Dr Stuart P. Wilson (Lecturer)

Contact

Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, S10 2TP, UK.

Tel: +44 (0) 114 222 6595

Summary

I am interested in how our experiences shape our developing brains, and I have been integrating theoretical, computational, behavioural, and robotic models of sensory processing in the context of tactile sensing. For my PhD I investigated the extent to which self-organising networks can explain how the somatosensory cortex learns to represent inputs from the body. As a research fellow, I piloted a novel neuroscientific approach, exploring cortical map self-organisation driven by the multi-sensory experiences of a synthetic rodent littermate. I am now a Lecturer in Cognitive Neuroscience.

Research Interests

Input driven self-organisation as a theory of cortical development
Neural computations underlying motion processing
Robots as scientific models
Spatial learning

Publications

2011

Wilson, S. P. (2011), Figuring time by space: Representing sensory motion in cortical maps, PhD Thesis, University of Sheffield, UK.
Wilson, S. P., Bednar JA, Prescott TJ, Mitchinson B (2011), Neural computation via neural geometry: A place code for inter-whisker timing in the barrel cortex?, PLoS Computational Biology, 7(10):e1002188.

2010

Wilson, S. P., Law, J. S., Mitchinson, B., Prescott, T. J., Bednar, J. A. (2010), Modeling the emergence of whisker direction maps in rat barrel cortex, PLoS ONE, 5(1): e8778.

2009

Alexander, T., Wilson, S. P., & Wilson, P. N. (2009), Blocking of spatial learning based on shape, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(3):694-708.

2007

Wilson, S. P. (2007), Self-organisation can explain the mapping of angular whisker deflections in the barrel cortex, Masters Thesis, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
Stafford, T. & Wilson, S. P. (2007), Self-organisation can generate the discontinuities in the somatosensory map, Neurocomputing, 70(10-12), 1932-1937.