Professor Peter Ulric Tse
Peter Ulric Tse is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.
Peter studied physics and mathematics as an undergraduate at Dartmouth 1980-1984. After several years working in Nepal, Germany and Japan, he started over in Cognitive Psychology at Harvard in 1992, after which he did a post-doc in monkey fMRI at the Max Planck Institute. Since 2001 he has been back at Dartmouth as a professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, with a focus on the operations that create visual consciousness from retinal inputs within about a third of a second, and later operations that occur over conscious visual operands, such as volitional attention. In Philosophy he has a special interest in the causal nature of volition and intention. In 2024 he published two books with OUP: “A Neurophilosophy of Libertarian Free Will” and “Free Imagination.”
Select publications
- Maechler, M. R., Choe, E., Cavanagh, P., Kohler, P. J., Tse, P. U. (2025). Hemifield Specificity of Attention Response Functions During Multiple Object Tracking. J Neuroscience, e1340242025. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1340-24.2025.
- Tse, P. U. (2025). The Disencapsulated Mind: A Premotor Theory of Human Imagination. Psychological Review. doi: 10.1037/rev0000535.
- Cavanagh, P., Caplovitz, G. P., Lytchenko, T. K., Maechler, M. R., Tse, P. U., and Sheinberg, D. R. (2023). The Architecture of Object-Based Attention. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. doi: 10.3758/s13423-023-02281-7.
- Frank, S. M., Otto, A., Volberg, G., Tse, P. U., Watanabe, T. and Greenlee, M. (2022). Transfer of tactile learning from trained to untrained body parts supported by cortical coactivation in primary somatosensory cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 42(31):6131-6144. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0301-22.2022.
- Frank, S., Forster, L., Pawallek, M., Malloni, W., Ahn, S., Tse, P. U. and Greenlee, M. (2021). Visual attention modulates glutamate-glutamine levels in vestibular cortex: Evidence from magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Journal of Neuroscience. 41(9):1970-1981. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2018-20.2020.
- Özkan, M., Tse, P. U., and Cavanagh, P. (2020). Pop-out for illusory rather than veridical trajectories with double-drift stimuli. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, doi: 10.3758/s13414-020-02035-w.
- Liu, S., Yu, Q., Tse, P. U., and Cavanagh, P. (2019). Neural correlates of the conscious perception of visual location lie outside visual cortex. Current Biology. pii: S0960-9822(19)31373-9. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.10.033.
- Sun, L. W., Hartstein, K. C., Frank, S. M., Hassan, W. and Tse, P. U. (2017). Back from the future: Volitional postdiction of perceived apparent motion direction. Vision Research, 140:133-139. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2017.09.001.
Select awards
- Humboldt Fellow
- Guggenheim Fellow
- Wilhem Bessel Prize
Further links
Homepage: sites.dartmouth.edu/peter
Free massive open online course (MOOC) on free will and the brain: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCh78lhDREMyIOCl3-9BeOWk3Q9MtxWGv
