Roland William Fleming, FRSB (born 1978 in Oxford, UK) is a British and German interdisciplinary researcher specializing in the visual perception of objects and materials. He is the Kurt Koffka Professor of Experimental Psychology at Justus Liebig University of Giessen. and the Executive Director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior of the Universities of Marburg and Giessen. He is also co-Spokesperson for the Research Cluster “The Adaptive Mind”.
Biography
Fleming was educated at New College School and Magdalen College School in Oxford. Thereafter, he was a student at New College, University of Oxford, where he studied for a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology. He graduated with First Class Honours in 1999. He then studied for a Doctorate at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, graduating in 2004. His doctoral thesis “Human Visual Perception under Real-World Illumination” was supervised by Edward H. Adelson.
In 2003, he took up a post-doctoral research position at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, working in the department of Heinrich H. Bülthoff. From 2009–2013 he served as co-Editor-In-Chief of the journal ACM Transactions on Applied Perception. In 2010, moved to the Justus Liebig University of Giessen to become the Kurt Koffka Junior Professor of Experimental Psychology. From 2013–2016, Fleming coordinated the Marie Curie Initial Training Network “PRISM: Perceptual Representation of Illumination, Shape and Material”. From 2016–2022 he ran the ERC Consolidator Grant “SHAPE: On the Perception of Growth, Form and Process”. He received tenure in 2016 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2020. In 2021 he became the Executive Director of the Centre for Mind, Brain and Behavior at the Universities of Marburg and Giessen. In 2022 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology. Fleming has served on the Expert Review Group and the Interview Panel for the Wellcome Trust.
Honors and awards
In 2012, Fleming was awarded the Faculty Research Prize of the Justus Liebig University of Giessen (“Preis der Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen”) for his work on the visual estimation of 3D shape from image orientations. In 2013, he was awarded the Elsevier/Vision Sciences Society Young Investigator Award. In 2016 he was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant “SHAPE: On the Perception of Growth, Form and Process”. In 2021, he delivered the Vision Sciences Society annual Public Lecture. In 2022 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology.
Research
Fleming specializes in the human visual perception of materials and objects, and their physical properties. He is particularly known for his contributions to establishing material perception as a field of study in vision science. He uses a combination of research methods from experimental psychology, computational neuroscience, computer graphics and machine learning.
Material Perception
Fleming’s early works focused on the visual perception of the optical properties of surfaces and materials, such as gloss, translucency and transparency. He helped determine the role of visual cues such as motion and binocular stereopsis in the perception of surface reflectance, especially gloss. A recurring theme within this work was the concept that specular reflections behave unlike surface markings—such as pigmentation patterns or scratches—leading to specific visual cues for identifying specular reflections and therefore glossy surfaces. He also investigated how multi-component patterns of specular reflection lead to hazy glossy appearances. His more recent studies on surface appearance have tested whether artificial neural networks can reproduce the patterns of errors and successes that human observers make when judging material properties.
In addition to studying how the visual system estimates optical properties of materials, he has also investigated the relationship between other material properties and material categories, and how these are affected by the viewing distance, as in the so-called ‘material-scale ambiguity’.
Fleming also led a number of studies on how the visual system infers the mechanical properties of materials, such as compliance, elasticity, and viscosity