He was Emeritus Professor of Physiology and Director of the Vision, Touch and Hearing Research Centre at the University of Queensland in Australia.
He studied a variety of different birds and mammals with modern neuronal tracing techniques to unravel principles of brain organization.
[2] Pettigrew was the first person to clarify the neurobiological basis of stereopsis when he described neurones sensitive to binocular disparity.
Pettigrew showed evidence for a role for non-visual pathways in the phenomenon of developmental neuroplasticity during the postnatal critical period.
Pettigrew used binocular rivalry as an assay for interhemispheric switching, whose rhythm is altered in bipolar disorder.