Dr. Gavin Buckingham is obsessed with understanding how people pick things up. To get a grip on the way that we perform this crucial everyday behaviour, he examines the subtle errors that people make when they lift up different objects. Dr. Buckingham uses cutting-edge behavioural and neuroimaging techniques to determine how people can minimise the impact of lifting errors and improving individuals’ abilities to learn new motor skills. One specific goal of Dr. Buckingham’s research is to determine whether any of our other senses can supplement, or even replace, our sense of touch. This research programme will have a big impact on people who cannot feel with their fingertips, such as individuals with carpal tunnel syndrome, sufferers of stroke, or amputees with a neurally-controlled prosthetic hand. Hailing from the UK, Dr. Buckingham was awarded his PhD in Psychology from the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) in 2008 under the supervision of Dr. David Carey. Since arriving in Canada, he has been working with Prof. Melvyn Goodale at the University of Western Ontario, where he is excited to continue his work at the Centre for Brain and Mind as a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow.
Articles
Asymmetries in Motor Attention during a Cued Bimanual Reaching Task: Left and Right Handers Compared (with Julie C. Main and David P. Carey), Cortex (2011)
Several studies have indicated that right handers have attention biased toward their right hand during...
The Role of Vision in Detecting and Correcting Fingertip Force Errors during Object Lifting (with Nathalie S. Ranger and Melvyn A. Goodale), Journal of Vision (2011)
Vision provides many reliable cues about the likely weight of an object, allowing individuals to...
The Material-weight Illusion Induced by Expectations Alone (with Nathalie S. Ranger and Melvyn A. Goodale), Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics (2011)
In the material-weight illusion (MWI), equally weighted objects that appear to be made from different...
Bimanual Reaching across the Hemispace: Which Hand Is Yoked to Which? (with Gordon Binsted and David P. Carey), Brain and Cognition (2010)
When both hands perform concurrent goal-directed reaches, they become yoked to one another. To investigate...
The Influence of Competing Perceptual and Motor Priors in the Context of the Size-weight Illusion (with Melvyn A. Goodale), Experimental Brain Research (2010)
When lifting objects of identical mass but different sizes, people perceive the smaller objects as...
Presentations
Learning from Mistakes: Improving Initial Fingertip Force Scaling by Observing Lifting Errors (with Minnie Tang, Paul Gribble, and Melvyn A. Goodale), Neural Control of Movement Meeting (2011)
• When lifting objects that are lighter or heaver than we expect them to be,...
Laterality, Perception, and Action during the Size-weight Illusion (with Nathalie S. Ranger and Melvyn A. Goodale), Society for Neuroscience Meeting (2010)
In the classic size-weight illusion (SWI), a small object will feel heavier than an larger...
Lifting without Seeing: The Role of Vision in Perceiving and Acting upon the Size‐weight Illusion (with Melvyn A. Goodale), GRSNC Meeting (2010)
Our expectations of an object’s heaviness not only drive our fingertip forces, but also our...
A Dissociation between Perception and Action in the Material‐weight Illusion (with Jonathan S. Cant, Kai-Ling C. Kao, and Melvyn A. Goodale), Vision Sciences Society (VSS) Meeting (2009)
We examined what forces are applied to objects that elicit this illusion when they are...