Geoffrey Boynton

Image of Geoffrey Boynton

Geoffrey Boynton, Ph.D.

Professor
(206) 685-6493
Advising: Not accepting new graduate students in 2024-2025.
Interests: Visual perception and its neural basis
Links:

Research

My lab works closely with the labs of Ione Fine and Scott Murray. We use a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), ERP and behavioral measurements to study the relationship between neuronal responses in the visual cortex of the brain and our conscious visual experience.

A major goal of my research is on attention, and specifically how and why some visual stimuli get past the attentional bottleneck and some don’t. I am also interested in the relationship, across individuals, between performance on a variety of perceptual tasks and the corresponding neural responses in cortical areas that represent the stimuli for those tasks.

Education

University of California, Santa Barbara (1994)

  • Fine I. and Boynton G.M. (2015). Pulse trains to percepts: the challenge of creating a perceptually intelligible world with sight recovery technologies. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 370(1677), 20140208.
  • Huber E., Webster J.M., Brewer A.A., MacLeod D.I., Wandell B.A., Boynton G.M., Wade A.R. and Fine I. (2015). A lack of experience-dependent plasticity after more than a decade of recovered sight. Psychol Sci, 26(4), 393-401.
  • Hubert-Wallander B. and Boynton G.M. (2015). Not all summary statistics are made equal: Evidence from extracting summaries across time. J Vis, 15, 5.
  • Thomas J.M., Huber E., Stecker G.C., Boynton G.M., Saenz M. and Fine I. (2015). Population receptive field estimates of human auditory cortex. Neuroimage, 105, 428-39.
  • Binda, P., Thomas, J.M., Boynton, G.M., and Fine, I. (2013) Minimizing Biases in Estimating the Reorganization of Human Visual Areas with BOLD Retinotopic Mapping (Journal of Vision)
  • Ernst, Z.R., Boynton, G.M., and Jazayeri, M. (2013) The Spread of Attention across Features of a Surface (J.Neurophysiol.)
  • Runeson E., Boynton G.M. and Murray S.O. (2013). Effects of task and attentional selection on responses in human visual cortex. J Neurophysiol, 109(10), 2606-17.
  • Ernst, Z. R., Palmer, J., & Boynton, G. M. (2012). Dividing attention between two transparent motion surfaces results in a failure of selective attention. J Vis, 12(12)
  • Joo, S. J., Boynton, G. M., & Murray, S. O. (2012). Long-range, pattern-dependent contextual effects in early human visual cortex. Curr Biol, 22(9), 781-786.
  • Lin, J.Y, Hubert-Wallander, B., Murray, S.O. and Boynton, G.M. (2011). “Rapid and reflexive feature-based attention”, J. Vision 1112):12, 1-9
  • Lin, J. Y., Murray, S. O., & Boynton, G. M. (2009). Capture of attention to threatening stimuli without perceptual awareness. Curr Biol, 19(13), 1118-1122.
  • Lin, J. Y., Pype, A. D., Murray, S. O., & Boynton, G. M. (2010). Enhanced memory for scenes presented at behaviorally relevant points in time. PLoS Biol, 8(3)
  • Boynton, G. M. (2009). A framework for describing the effects of attention on visual responses. Vision Res, 49(10)
  • Serences, J. T., & Boynton, G. M. (2007). Feature-based attentional modulations in the absence of direct visual stimulation. Neuron, 55(2), 301-312.