Professor

Professor

A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

 Roger Hugh Stephen Carpenter (born 2 September 1945) is an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 neurophysiologist

Neurophysiology

Neurophysiology is a part of physiology. Neurophysiology is the study of nervous system function...

, Professor of Oculomotor Physiology at the University of Cambridge

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

.

Early life

Carpenter was educated at Gresham's School

Gresham's School

Gresham’s School is an independent coeducational boarding school in Holt in North Norfolk, England, a member of the HMC.The school was founded in 1555 by Sir John Gresham as a free grammar school for forty boys, following King Henry VIII's dissolution of the Augustinian priory at Beeston Regis...

, Holt, Norfolk

Holt, Norfolk

Holt is a market town and civil parish in the English county of Norfolk. The town is north of the city of Norwich, west of Cromer and east of King's Lynn. The town is on the route of the A148 King's Lynn to Cromer road. The nearest railway station is in the town of Sheringham where access to the...

, where he was a member of Farfield

Farfield

Farfield is one of the seven boarding houses at Gresham's, an English public school at Holt, Norfolk. It was opened in 1911, as part of a surge of renewal and expansion at Gresham's led by George Howson, and the first housemaster and boys were transferred there from a smaller house called Bengal...

 (1958–1963), and then at Cambridge.

Career

Before being appointed as Professor of Oculomotor Physiology in the University of Cambridge, Carpenter was a Director of Studies in Medicine at Caius College

Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

Gonville and Caius College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. The college is often referred to simply as "Caius" , after its second founder, John Keys, who fashionably latinised the spelling of his name after studying in Italy.- Outline :Gonville and...

. In his principal field, mechanisms of consciousness, his position can be described as a one-way Cartesian. He is the creator of EPIC (the Experimental Physiology Instrumentation Computer) and NeuroLab, a set of interactive demonstrations on the working of the human brain.

In his spare time, he runs the CUDOS project (Cambridge University Distributed Opportunity Systems), aimed at using medical students' gap year

Gap year

An expression or phrase that is associated with taking time out to travel in between life stages. It is also known as sabbatical, time off and time out that refers to a period of time in which students disengage from curricular education and undertake non curricular activities, such as travel or...

 between school and university. He was previously Director of a group called the Susato Consort and Susato Baroque Ensemble.

In 2000, Carpenter was one of a group of twenty inaugural winners of a National Teaching Award of £50,000 from the Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education

Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education

The Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education was a British organisation aiming to enhance the status of teaching in higher education; maintain and improve the quality of learning and teaching in higher education; and set standards of good professional practice...

.

Interests

Carpenter's work focusses on the brain's mechanisms of decision, and especially the 'saccadic latency', which is the measurement of the time taken for the brain to choose a visual target. This work has prompted a model referred to as LATER, an acronym for 'Linear Approach to Threshold with Ergodic Rate'. Technological advances enable such measurements to be made both quickly and non-invasively, using micro-devices which have many clinical applications. He also has professional interests in vision in general, motor systems, and physiological mechanisms of consciousness.

On a Cambridge web site, Carpenter describes himself as "Philosopher, mad scientist, and artiste extraordinaire".

Major publications

• Movements of the Eyes (Pion, London, 1988)
• Neurophysiology (Arnolds, London, 1996)
• Vision Research: a Practical Guide to Laboratory Methods (with J. G. Robson) (Oxford University Press, 1998)
• Neurofisiologia, Italian translation by Paolo Martini (Casa Editrice Ambrosiana, Milan, 1995)
• Neurofisiología, Spanish translation of 3rd English edition by J D A Martinez & J J A Valdivieso (El Manual Moderno, Santafé de Bogotá, 1998)
• Neurophysiology (Arnolds, London, 2002)

Selected publications

• (with Williams, M. L. L.) 'Neural computation of log likelihood in the control of saccadic eye movements' in Nature
  Nature
  Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...
  
  (1995), 377 59-62
• 'Moving the Mental Maps' in Current Biology 5 (1995) 1082-84
• (with Merrison, A. F. A.) 'Express smooth pursuit' in Vision Research 35 (1995) 1459-1462
• 'Eye movements and the mechanisms of accommodation and the pupil' in Comprehensive Human Physiology, R. Greger and U. Windhorst, eds., (Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1996) 829-837
• (with Kinsler, V.) 'Saccadic eye movements while reading music' in Vision Research 35 (1995), 1447–1458
• (with Khan, O., Taylor, S. J., Jones, J. G., Swart, M., & Hanes, D. P.) 'Effects of low dose isoflurane on saccade eye movement generation' in British Journal of Anaesthesia (1997), 87 675
• 'Sensorimotor processing: charting the frontier' in Current Biology 7 (1997). 348-351
• (with Hanes, D. P.) 'Countermanding saccades in humans' in Society for Neuroscience Abstract (1997), 23 757.
• (with Heywood, H.) 'Blood glucose and saccadic latency' in Journal of Physiology (1998), 506 122P
• (with Khan, O., Taylor, S. J., Jones, J. G., Swart, M., & Hanes, D. P., 'Effects of low-dose isoflurane on saccade eye movement generation' in Anaesthesia 54 (1999), 142-145
• 'Mouvements oculaires et lecture musicale au piano' in Médecine des Arts 28 (1999), 8-13
• 'A neural mechanism that randomises behaviour' in Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (1999), 13-22
• 'Visual selection; neurons that make up their minds' in Current Biology 9 (1999), 595-598
• (with Hanes, D. P.) 'Countermanding saccades in humans' in Vision Research 39 (1999), 2777–2791
• (with Jandziol, A. K., Prabhu, M., and Jones, J. G.) 'Blink duration: a function of anaesthetic sedation' in British Journal of Anaesthesia 84 (2000), 278P.
• 'The neural control of looking' in Current Biology 10 (2000), 291-293
• (with Reddi, B.) 'The influence of urgency on decision time' in Nature Neuroscience 3 (2000), 827-831
• 'Express saccades: is bimodality a result of the order of stimulus presentation?' in Vision Research 41 (2001), 1145–1151
• (with Reddi, B.) 'Putting noise into neurophysiological models of simple decision making: a reply to Roger Ratcliff' in Nature Neuroscience 4 (2001), 336-337.
• (with Jandziol, A. K., Prabhu, M., & Jones, J. G.) 'Blink duration as a measure of low-level anaesthetic sedation' in European Journal of Anaesthesiology 18 (2001), 476-484.
• (with Leach, J. C. D.) 'Saccadic choice with asynchronous targets: evidence for independent randomisation' in Vision Research 41 (2001), 3437-3445
• (with Asrress, K. N.) 'Saccadic countermanding: a comparison of central and peripheral stop signals' in Vision Research 41 (2001), 2645–2651
• (with Ware, J. S., & Blount, P. R.) 'The dynamics of expectation: rapid effects of probabilistic cues on saccadic latency' in Neural Control of Movement: 11th Annual Meeting, (ed. Strick, P. L., Seville, 2001), pp. D-04
• 'Reaching out: cortical mechanisms of directed action' in Current Biology 12 (2002), R517-519
• (with Descamps, M. J. L., Morley, C. H., Leary, T. S. & Jones, J. G.) 'The effect of low dose sevoflurane on saccadic eye movement latency' in Anaesthesia 57 (2002), 855-859
• (with Zarei, M., Nouraei, S. A. R., Caine, D., & Hodges, J. R.) 'Neuropsychological and quantitative oculometric study of a case of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease at pre-dementia stage' in Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry 73 n(2002), 56-58
• (with Nouraei, S. A. R., De Pennington, N., & Jones, J. G.) 'Dose response effect of sevoflurane sedation on the higher control of eye movements and decision-making' in British Journal of Anaesthesia 91 (2003), 175-183
• (with Ober, J. K., Przedpelska-Ober, E., Gryncewicz, W., Dylak, J., & Ober, J. J.) 'Hand-held system for ambulatory measurement of saccadic durations of neurological patients', in Modelling and Measurement in Medicine, ed. Gajda, J., (Komitet Biocybernityki i Inzyneierii Biomedycznej PAN, Warsaw, 2003), pp. 187–198
• (with Reddi, B. A. J., & Asrress, K. N.) 'Accuracy, information and response time in a saccadic decision task' in Journal of Neurophysiology 90 (2003), 3538-3546
• (with Anderson, A.J.) 'Dynamics of probability prediction in a saccadic latency task' in Journal of Physiology (2004), 555P D554
• 'The saccadic system: a neurological microcosm' in Advances in Clinical Neuroscience and Rehabilitation 4 (2004), 6-8
• 'Supplementary eye field: keeping an eye on eye movement' in Current Biology 14 (2004), R416-418.
• 'Homeostasis: a plea for a unified approach' in Advances in Physiology Education 28 (2004), S180-187
• 'Contrast, probability and saccadic latency: evidence for independence of detection and decision' in Current Biology 14 (2004), 1576–1580
• (with Swann, M. F., and Reitter, S. J.) 'An inexpensive solid-state stimulator for ocular pursuit' in Journal of Physiology (2004), 555P D553
• (with Jones, J. G.) 'Hypothesis - ocular monitoring techniques used in anaesthetic sedation may benefit drivers' in Bulletin of the Royal College of Anaesthetists 28 (2004), 1414–1415
• (with Lamabadusuriya, H. I., & Martin, R. I. R.) 'The effect of distractors on saccadic latency' in Journal of Physiology (2004), 555P PC127
• (with Reddi, B. A. J.) 'Venous excess: a new approach to cardiovascular control and its teaching' in Journal of Applied Physiology 98 (2004), 356-364
• 'Does scopesthesia imply extramission?' in Journal of Consciousness Studies 12 (2005), 76-78
• 'Visual pursuit: an instructive area of cortex' in Current Biology 15 (2005), R638-640
• (with McDonald, S. A., and Shillcock, R. C.) 'An anatomically-constrained, stochastic model of eye movement control in reading' in Psychological Review 112 (2005), 814-840
• (with Anderson, A. J.) 'Saccadic latency in deterministic environments: getting back on track after the unexpected happens' in Journal of Vision 10(14) (2010), pdf

External links

• Select publications Roger Carpenter, Professor of Oculomotor Physiology at cam.ac.uk
• R. H. S. Carpenter, A neural mechanism that randomises behaviour (1999), full text online at cam.ac.uk
• R. H. S. Carpenter, Express saccades: is bimodality a result of the order of stimulus presentation? (2001), full text online at cam.ac.uk