Professor Tony Prescott

Address:
Department of Psychology,
The University of Sheffield,
Western Bank,
Sheffield S10 2TN, UK
Tel: (+44) 0114 222 6547
Fax: (+44) 0114 276 6515
Email: T.J.Prescott "at" sheffield.ac.uk
Room: 2-17

Summary

I am Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sheffield. This is my Departmental Home-page. For full details of my research and publications, and many downloadable articles, please see my Research Homepage.

Qualifications

MA (Edinburgh), MSc (Aberdeen), PhD (Sheffield)

Research Interests

My research is within the area of computational modelling in the Cognitive Neurosciences, and is concerned with understanding the neural and bodily substrates for natural intelligence.

A particular focus is on the investigation of embodied models of animal and human intelligence in the form of robotic systems. Neural systems in which I have an active interest include the basal ganglia and the medial reticular formation (both viewed as being part of the neural substrate for the selection of action) and the sensorimotor circuits involved in visual orienting and tactile perception. I also conduct neuroethological research on tactile behaviour in animals.

Much of my research is done under the auspices of the Department's Adaptive Behaviour Research Group and the Active Touch Laboratory.

Grants

• European Union Framework 7 ICT Project 215910. T. J. Prescott (Co-ordinator and PI): BIOmimetic Technology for vibrissal ACtive Touch (BIOTACT) (2008-). (Jan 2008-Dec 2011). Total project value €7.8M (~€1.4M European Union contribution to Sheffield).
  
  
• European Union Framework 6 Cognitive Systems Project ST-027819-IP. T.J. Prescott (PI): Integration Cognition, Emotion, and Action (ICEA). (Jan 2006–Dec 2009). €8.08M (~€0.9M to Sheffield).
  
  
• EPRSC EP/C516303/1. Collaboration between 5 UK Universities. K. Gurney (PI) and TJ. Prescott: REVERB: Reverse Engineering the VERtebrate Brain (April 2005-March 2010). £1.8M (~£0.7M to Sheffield).
  
  
• EPRSC GR/S19639/01. Collaboration with Bristol Robotics Laborator. TJ. Prescott (PI): WhiskerBot: A Robot Whisker System Modelled on the Rat Mystacial Vibrissae (September 2003-August 2006). £430k (~£150k to Sheffield).
  
  
• EPRSC GR/R95722/01 T. J. Prescott (PI), K. Gurney, P. Redgrave: Robot control using a model of central structures in the vertebrate brain (Sept 2002–August 2005). £161k.

Activities and Distinctions

• Founder and co-director of the Adaptive Behaviour Research Group.
• Co-ordinator of the EU FP7 BIOTACT project.
• Visiting Research Fellow at Bristol Robotics Laboratory.
• Member of the EPSRC College.
  
• My research has been covered by Radio 4 Material World, The Economist, Focus Magazine, and American Scientist.

Recent Representative Publications

WILSON, S. P., LAW, J. S., 1, MITCHINSON, B., PRESCOTT, T. J., BEDNAR, J. A. (In press). Modeling the emergence of whisker direction maps in rat barrel cortex. PLoS ONE.

HUMPHRIES, M. D. AND PRESCOTT, T. J. (In press). The ventral basal ganglia, a selection mechanism at the crossroads of space, strategy, and reward. Progress in Neurobiology.

CHAMBERS, J. M. AND PRESCOTT, T. J. (In press). Response times for visually guided saccades in persons with Parkinson's disease: A meta-analytic review. Neuropsychologia.

MITCHINSON, B., CHAN, T., HUMPHRIES, M., CHAMBERS, J., FOX, C. AND PRESCOTT, T. J. (2010). BRAHMS: Novel middleware for integrated systems computation. Advanced Engineering Informatics, 24(1):49-61.

PRESCOTT, T. J., MITCHINSON, B., AND GRANT, R. (In press). Vibrissal function and behavior. Scholarpedia.

PRESCOTT, T. J., PEARSON, M., MITCHINSON, B., SULLIVAN, J. C. W., PIPE, A. G. (2009). Whisking with robots: From rat vibrissae to biomimetic technology for active touch. IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, 16(3), 42-50.

FOX, C. W., MITCHINSON, B., PEARSON, M. J., PIPE, A. G., PRESCOTT, T. J. (2009). Behavioral dependency of texture classification in a whiskered mobile robot. Autonomous Robots, 26(4), 223-239.

FOX C, HUMPHRIES M, MITCHINSON B, KISS T, SOMOGYVARI Z AND PRESCOTT T. J. (2009) Technical integration of hippocampus, basal ganglia and physical models for spatial navigation. Frontiers of Neuroinformatics. 3(6).

GRANT, R. A., MITCHINSON, B., FOX, C., PRESCOTT, T. J. (2009). Active touch sensing in the rat: Anticipatory and regulatory control of whisker movements during surface exploration. Journal of Neurophysiology, 101. 862-874.

PRESCOTT, T. J. (2008). Action Selection. Scholarpedia, 3(2):2705.

MITCHINSON, B., ARABZADEH, E., DIAMOND, M. E., PRESCOTT, T. J. (2008). Spike-timing in primary sensory neurons: a model of somatosensory transduction in the rat. Biological Cybernetics, 98(3), 185-193.

PRESCOTT, T. J., BRYSON, J. J., & SETH. A. (2007) Modelling Natural Action Selection. A Theme Issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. Biological Sciences, 362(1485).

MITCHINSON, B., MARTIN, C.J., GRANT, R.A., PRESCOTT, T.J. (2007), Feedback control in active sensing: rat exploratory whisking is modulated by environmental contact, Royal Society Proceedings B, 274(1613).

PRESCOTT, T. J. (2007), Forced moves or good tricks in design space? Landmarks in the evolution of neural mechanisms for action selection, Adaptive Behavior, 15: 9-31.

PRESCOTT, T. J., MONTES GONZALEZ, F. M., GURNEY, K., HUMPHRIES, M. D., & REDGRAVE, P. (2006). A robot model of the basal ganglia: behavior and intrinsic processing. Neural Networks, 19. 31-61.

PRESCOTT, T. J., NEWTON, L. D., MIR, N. U., and PARKS, R. W. (2006), A new dissimilarity measure for finding semantic structure in category fluency data with implications for understanding memory organization in schizophrenia, Neuropsychology, 20:685-99.

HUMPHRIES, M. D., GURNEY, K. & PRESCOTT, T. J. (2006).
The brainstem reticular formation is a small-world, not scale-free, network. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 273, 503-511.

View a full list of Tony Prescott's publications and available downloads

Postgraduate Students

• Robyn Grant - PhD student
  Stuart Wilson - PhD student
  Mat Evans - PhD student