Post:	Reader in Psychology
Location:	Pevensey 1 2C06
Email:	romin@sussex.ac.uk
Telephone numbers
Internal:	8704
UK:	(01273) 678704
International:	+44 1273 678704

Biography

Sussex University: Psychology Home Page

Education:  Punjab University, India; Rutgers University, New Jersey; University of California, Berkeley.
Postdoc/Research Associate:  Cornell University, New York; California Institute of Technology.
Degrees:  MA, MSc, PhD

Research

Dr Nijhawan is interested in the flash-lag effect and its implications for the interaction of the animal with the environment.  The flash-lag effect occurs when observers view a moving object a part of which is briefly flashed.  Observers see a 'break' between the moving part and the flashed part, with the flashed part appearing in a lagging position. 

Dr Nijhawan has the honour of publishing the first paper (in 1994) to mention the term "flash-lag effect", and starting intense research activity on this topic.  Professors Schlag and Schlag-Rey (2002) of UCLA School of Medicine have described the proposal in the 1994 paper as one of the "most-daring proposals... with bold disregard for the venerable".

Since 1994, Dr Nijhawan and colleagues have shown that the flash-lag effect occurs for changing (non-moving) visual stimuli, during eye-movements, and most recently for voluntary limb movements in total darkness. 

The flash-lag paradigm has been successfully used to investigate topics such as: colour vision, visual attention, visual masking, perceptual filling-in, and forward models for motor control.  Effects of sporting experience, alcohol, age and dysfunction of the nervous system are in the process of being investigated with this method.

Teaching

Perception and Attention
Visual Perception and Cognition
Cognitive Neuroscience

Selected publications

2006

Forward displacement of fading objects in motion: The role of transient signals in perceiving position. (with Gerrit Maus) in Vision Research Volume 46 pp. 4375-4381

2004

Compensation for neural delays in visual-motor behaviour: No evidence for shorter afferent delays for visual motion. (with Beena Khurana, Watanabe, K. and Shimojo, S.) in Visual Cognition Volume 11 pp. 275-298

2003

Analogous mechanisms compensate for neural delays in the sensory and the motor pathways: evidence from motor flash-lag. (with Kirschfeld, K) in Current Biology Volume 13 pp. 749-753

2002

Neural delays, visual motion and the flash-lag effect. in Trends in Cognitive Sciences Volume 6 pp. 387-393

Shifts in perceived position of flashed stimuli by illusory object motion (with Watanabe, K and Shimojo) in Vision Research Volume 42 pp. 2645-2650

2001

The flash-lag phenomenon: Object-motion and Eye-movements in Perception Volume 30 pp. 263-282

2000

Changing objects lead to briefly flashed ones (with Sheth B and Shimojo S) Nature Neuroscience: Nature Neuroscience Volume 3 pp. 489-495 ISBN 1097-6256