Mark Nawrot

Mark Nawrot is a professor of psychology specializing in visual and cognitive neuroscience. His research seeks to understand how the brain transforms the constantly changing patterns of light reaching the eyes into a stable, three-dimensional perception of the world.

A central focus of his work has been motion parallax—the phenomenon in which objects at different distances appear to move at different speeds and directions as an observer moves through the environment. His research has helped characterize how the visual system combines retinal image motion with eye movement signals to determine the relative depth and three-dimensional structure. This work integrates psychophysical experiments, eye-movement measurements, computational approaches, and mathematical models to investigate the mechanisms underlying spatial vision. More broadly, his research addresses a fundamental problem in visual neuroscience: how the brain combines sensory information with information about our own movements to construct an accurate representation of the external world.

He has combined research and teaching with extensive academic leadership, service, and mentorship. His approach to research and mentoring with students emphasizes learning how to ask important questions, design effective experiments, evaluate evidence, and communicate scientific ideas while helping students develop the scientific reasoning and problem-solving skills needed to pursue questions on their own.