This event is a collaboration between the School of Health Sciences and the School of Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering in honour of Janet and Peter Wolf.

In this talk John S. Werner will explore the art and science of colour vision across the life span in the form of a biography; the biography of the eye of Claude Monet and that of his fellow Impressionists. Neural pathways subserving colour vision change continuously throughout life. Concurrently, the lens loses its transparency; it becomes brown, thereby decreasing portions of the short-wave spectrum reaching the retina. It is often thought that colour perception will be altered owing to brunescence of the aging lens. This expectation is reasonable, but wrong. Instead, colour perception is relatively stable (save for cataract) due to active processes of renormalization of colour mechanisms across the life span.

John S. Werner is an American scientist who studies human vision and its changes across the life span. He is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Davis in the Department of Ophthalmology and Vision Science, and Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behaviour.