Dale Purves

Dale Purves is Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and George Barth Geller Professor for Research in Neurobiology at Duke University. He received a B.A. from Yale in 1960 and an M.D. from the Harvard Medical School in 1964. After several years in clinical medicine as a surgical house officer at the Massachusetts General Hospital and as a Peace Corps Physician, he gave up medicine in favor of a career in neuroscience research. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard from 1968-71 and in the Department of Biophysics, University College London, from 1971-73. He then joined the faculty in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the Washington University in 1971, where he remained until 1990. During that time studied the development of the nervous system, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1989. He came to Duke in 1990 as the founding chair of the Department of Neurobiology, where he became increasingly interested in cognitive neuroscience. Purves’s work at Duke has focused visual and auditory perception (music), exploring the hypothesis that, as a means of contending with the inverse problem, percepts are generated by a neural strategy that represents the empirical significance of sensory stimuli rather than their physical features.

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Selected Recent Publications

Yang Z, Purves D (2003) Image/Source statistics in natural scenes. Network: Computation in Neural Systems 14: 371-390^[1].
Yang Z, Purves D (2003) A statistical explanation of visual space. Nature Neuroscience 6: 632-640^[2].
Schwartz D, Howe CQ, Purves D (2003) The statistical structure of human speech sounds predicts musical universals. J Neurosci 23:7160-7168^[3].
Purves D, Lotto RB (2003) Why we see what we do: An empirical theory of vision. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates^[4].
Howe Q, Purves D (2003) Size contrast explained by the statistics of scene geometry. J Cog Neurosci 16:90-102^[5].
Long F, Purves D (2003) Natural scene statistics as a universal basis for color context effects. Proc Natl Acad Sci 100 (25): 15190-15193.^[6]
Purves D, Williams MS, Nundy S, Lotto RB (2004) Perceiving the intensity of light. Psychological Rev 111(1): 142-158.
Yang Z, Purves D (2004) The statistical structure of natural light patterns determines perceived light intensity. Proc Natl Acad Sci 101: 8745-8750^[7].
Schwartz D, Purves D (2004) Pitch is determined by naturally occurring periodic sounds. Hearing Research 194: 31-46^[8].
Howe CQ, Purves D (2005) Natural scene geometry predicts the perception of angles and line orientation. Proc Natl Acad Sci 102: 1228-1233^[9].
Howe CQ, Purves D (2005) The Müller-Lyer illusion explained by the statistics of image-source relationships. Proc Natl Acad Sci 102: 1234-1239^[10].
Howe CQ, Yang Z, Purves D (2005) The Poggendorf illusion explained by natural scene statistics of image-source relationships. Proc Natl Acad Sci 102:7707-7712 ^[11].
Long F, Yang Z, Purves D (2006) Spectral statistics in natural scene predict hue, saturation, and brightness. Proc Natl Acad Sci 103: 6013-6018^[12].
Howe CQ, Lotto RB, Purves D (2006) Comparison of bayesian and empirical ranking approaches to visual perception. J Theor Biol 241: 866-875^[13].
Boots B, Nundy S, Purves D (2007) Evolution of visually-guided behavior in artificial agents. Network: Computation in Neural Systems 18 (1): 1-24^[14].
Ross D, Choi J, Purves D (2007) Musical intervals in speech. Proc Natl Acad Sci 104(23): 9852-9857^[15].
Purves D, Augustine GA, Fitzpatrick D, Hall W, LaMantia A-S, McNamara JO, Williams SM (2007) Neuroscience, 4rd edition. Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA^[16].
Purves et al. (2007) Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience. Sunderland,MA: Sinauer Associates, 2007^[17].