Geoffrey Boynton, Ph.D.
Professor
(206) 685-6493
Advising:
Accepting new graduate students in 2025-2026.
Interests: Visual perception and its neural basis
Links:
Research
My lab works closely with the labs of Ione Fine and Scott Murray. We use a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), ERP and behavioral measurements to study the relationship between neuronal responses in the visual cortex of the brain and our conscious visual experience.
A major goal of my research is on attention, and specifically how and why some visual stimuli get past the attentional bottleneck and some don’t. I am also interested in the relationship, across individuals, between performance on a variety of perceptual tasks and the corresponding neural responses in cortical areas that represent the stimuli for those tasks.
Education
University of California, Santa Barbara (PhD) (1994)
- July 29, 2024 Ione Fine and Geoffrey Boynton publish research showing that cortical implants unlikely to exceed normal human vision
- April 27, 2021 Congratulations to Ione Fine and Geoffrey Boynton, who received a five-year, $1,880,561 award from the NIH National Eye Institute!
- April 2, 2019 Congratulations to Geoff Boynton and co-principal investigator, Pat Kuhl, who received an award for an MRI machine from the National Science Foundation!
- August 4, 2017 Geoff Boynton emphasizes the safety risks of distracted driving in a Daily of the University of Washington article.
- June 7, 2017 Geoff Boynton talks about the dangers of multi-tasking while driving in this UW Daily story.
- January 4, 2017 Geoff Boynton and Ione Fine’s research on retinal implants cited in Mashable story about bionic eyes.
- August 5, 2015 Ione Fine and Geoff Boynton’s work on visual simulations using a bionic eye have been brought to light in an article by The Telegraph
- April 27, 2015 We aren’t the only ones who see the incredible work Ione Fine and Geoffrey Boynton are doing.
- November 20, 2013 Geoff Boynton (Associate Professor) and Jessica Thomas (graduate student) demonstrated that it is possible to identify songs that one is listening to (or thinking about!) by looking at brain activity patterns.
- October 9, 2013 Congratulations to Bjorn Hubert-Wallander, an NSF Fellow, for being selected to meet with the very prestigious National Science Board.
- October 10, 2011 Steve Buck, Ione Fine, and Geoff Boynton organized the Optical Society of America Vision Meeting, held on campus, September 15-18.
- April 7, 2010 Jeffrey Lin is the lead author of a paper that is receiving national coverage. "Making memories may be in the timing," and "Memory for Visual Scenes Is Enhanced When Events Occur at Behaviorally Relevant Times,"
- April 13, 2009 Geoffrey Boynton, Eliot Brenowtiz, Cheryl Kaiser, Jeansok Kim, Alan Marlatt, Scott Murray, and the Clinical Psychology Program all received mention in the Awards and Honors section of the recent on-line version of A&S Perspectives magazine.
- February 23, 2009 Jeffrey Lin was awarded a 2009 Elsevier/Vision Research Travel Award for the 2009 Annual Vision Sciences Society Conference in Florida this May.
- January 26, 2009 In late December, 2009 Geoff Boynton was voted recipient of the Early Investigator Award of the Society of Experimental Psychologists.
- November 30, 2006 Geoffrey Boyton who was appointed as an Editor to the Editorial Board of the Journal of Vision.
- November 16, 2006 Congratulations to Geoffrey Boyton who was recently appointed as an Editor to the Editorial Board of the Journal of Vision
- Fine, I., & Boynton, G. M. (2023). Pulse trains to percepts: A virtual patient describing the perceptual effects of human visual cortical stimulation. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.03.18.532424
- Johnson, M., Palmer, J., Moore, C. M., & Boynton, G. M. (2023). Evidence from partially valid cueing that words are processed serially. Psychon Bull Rev, 30(4), 1539-1548. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-022-02230-w
- Meier, K., Tarczy-Hornoch, K., Boynton, G. M., & Fine, I. (2023). Characterizing amblyopic perception under non-rivalrous viewing conditions. Sci Rep, 13(1), 7993. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-31301-8
- Popovkina, D. V., Palmer, J., Moore, C. M., & Boynton, G. M. (2023). Testing hemifield independence for divided attention in visual object tasks. J Vis, 23(13), 3. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.23.13.3
- Yucel, E. I., Sadeghi, R., Kartha, A., Montezuma, S. R., Dagnelie, G., Rokem, A., Boynton, G. M., Fine, I., & Beyeler, M. (2022). Factors affecting two-point discrimination in Argus II patients. Front Neurosci, 16, 901337. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2022.901337
- Esquenazi, R. B., Meier, K., Beyeler, M., Boynton, G. M., & Fine, I. (2021). Learning to see again: Perceptual learning of simulated abnormal on- off-cell population responses in sighted individuals. J Vis, 21(13), 10. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.21.13.10
- Moreland, J. C., Palmer, J., & Boynton, G. M. (2021). A major role for retrieval and/or comparison in the set-size effects of change detection. J Vis, 21(13), 2. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.21.13.2
- Popovkina, D. V., Palmer, J., Moore, C. M., & Boynton, G. M. (2021). Is there a serial bottleneck in visual object recognition? J Vis, 21(3), 15. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.21.3.15
- Johnson, M. L., Palmer, J., Moore, C. M., & Boynton, G. M. (2020). Endogenous cueing effects for detection can be accounted for by a decision model of selective attention. Psychon Bull Rev, 27(2), 315-321. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-019-01698-3
- White, A. L., Palmer, J., & Boynton, G. M. (2020). Visual word recognition: Evidence for a serial bottleneck in lexical access. Atten Percept Psychophys, 82(4), 2000-2017. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01916-z
- Beyeler, M., Boynton, G. M., Fine, I., & Rokem, A. (2019). Model-Based Recommendations for Optimal Surgical Placement of Epiretinal Implants. Med Image Comput Comput Assist Interv, 11768, 394-402. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32254-0_44
- Beyeler, M., Nanduri, D., Weiland, J. D., Rokem, A., Boynton, G. M., & Fine, I. (2019). A model of ganglion axon pathways accounts for percepts elicited by retinal implants. Sci Rep, 9(1), 9199. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-45416-4
- Sprague, T. C., Boynton, G. M., & Serences, J. T. (2019). The Importance of Considering Model Choices When Interpreting Results in Computational Neuroimaging. eNeuro, 6(6). https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0196-19.2019
- White, A. L., Boynton, G. M., & Yeatman, J. D. (2019). The link between reading ability and visual spatial attention across development. Cortex, 121, 44-59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2019.08.011
- White, A. L., Boynton, G. M., & Yeatman, J. D. (2019). You Can't Recognize Two Words Simultaneously. Trends Cogn Sci, 23(10), 812-814. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2019.07.001
- White, A. L., Palmer, J., Boynton, G. M., & Yeatman, J. D. (2019). Parallel spatial channels converge at a bottleneck in anterior word-selective cortex. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 116(20), 10087-10096. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1822137116
- White, A. L., Palmer, J., & Boynton, G. M. (2018). Evidence of Serial Processing in Visual Word Recognition. Psychol Sci, 29(7), 1062-1071. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617751898
- Beyeler, M., Rokem, A., Boynton, G. M., & Fine, I. (2017). Learning to see again: biological constraints on cortical plasticity and the implications for sight restoration technologies. J Neural Eng, 14(5), 051003. https://doi.org/10.1088/1741-2552/aa795e
- Chang, K. H., Thomas, J. M., Boynton, G. M., & Fine, I. (2017). Reconstructing Tone Sequences from Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Blood-Oxygen Level Dependent Responses within Human Primary Auditory Cortex. Front Psychol, 8, 1983. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01983
- Moreland, J. C., & Boynton, G. M. (2017). A neurophysiological explanation for biases in visual localization. Atten Percept Psychophys, 79(2), 553-562. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-016-1251-z
- White, A. L., Runeson, E., Palmer, J., Ernst, Z. R., & Boynton, G. M. (2017). Evidence for unlimited capacity processing of simple features in visual cortex. J Vis, 17(6), 19. https://doi.org/10.1167/17.6.19
- Jiang, F., Stecker, G. C., Boynton, G. M., & Fine, I. (2016). Early Blindness Results in Developmental Plasticity for Auditory Motion Processing within Auditory and Occipital Cortex. Front Hum Neurosci, 10, 324. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00324
- Fine I. and Boynton G.M. (2015). Pulse trains to percepts: the challenge of creating a perceptually intelligible world with sight recovery technologies. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 370(1677), 20140208.
- Huber E., Webster J.M., Brewer A.A., MacLeod D.I., Wandell B.A., Boynton G.M., Wade A.R. and Fine I. (2015). A lack of experience-dependent plasticity after more than a decade of recovered sight. Psychol Sci, 26(4), 393-401.
- Hubert-Wallander B. and Boynton G.M. (2015). Not all summary statistics are made equal: Evidence from extracting summaries across time. J Vis, 15, 5.
- Thomas J.M., Huber E., Stecker G.C., Boynton G.M., Saenz M. and Fine I. (2015). Population receptive field estimates of human auditory cortex. Neuroimage, 105, 428-39.
- Binda, P., Thomas, J.M., Boynton, G.M., and Fine, I. (2013) Minimizing Biases in Estimating the Reorganization of Human Visual Areas with BOLD Retinotopic Mapping (Journal of Vision)
- Ernst, Z.R., Boynton, G.M., and Jazayeri, M. (2013) The Spread of Attention across Features of a Surface (J.Neurophysiol.)
- Runeson E., Boynton G.M. and Murray S.O. (2013). Effects of task and attentional selection on responses in human visual cortex. J Neurophysiol, 109(10), 2606-17.
- Ernst, Z. R., Palmer, J., & Boynton, G. M. (2012). Dividing attention between two transparent motion surfaces results in a failure of selective attention. J Vis, 12(12)
- Joo, S. J., Boynton, G. M., & Murray, S. O. (2012). Long-range, pattern-dependent contextual effects in early human visual cortex. Curr Biol, 22(9), 781-786.
- Lin, J.Y, Hubert-Wallander, B., Murray, S.O. and Boynton, G.M. (2011). “Rapid and reflexive feature-based attention”, J. Vision 1112):12, 1-9
- Lin, J. Y., Murray, S. O., & Boynton, G. M. (2009). Capture of attention to threatening stimuli without perceptual awareness. Curr Biol, 19(13), 1118-1122.
- Lin, J. Y., Pype, A. D., Murray, S. O., & Boynton, G. M. (2010). Enhanced memory for scenes presented at behaviorally relevant points in time. PLoS Biol, 8(3)
- Boynton, G. M. (2009). A framework for describing the effects of attention on visual responses. Vision Res, 49(10)
- Serences, J. T., & Boynton, G. M. (2007). Feature-based attentional modulations in the absence of direct visual stimulation. Neuron, 55(2), 301-312.