She proposed V1 Saliency Hypothesis (V1SH), and is the author of Understanding vision: theory, models, and data[6] published by Oxford University Press.

In 1998, Li Zhaoping, together with Geoffrey Hinton and Peter Dayan, co-founded the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit in University College London.

[1][14] Proposed in the late-1990s, V1SH was unpopular initially, since it was contrary to the main and popular idea that the frontal and parietal areas of the brain are responsible for the saliency map.

[15] As V1SH gathered more experimental support,[16][17][18] Zhaoping became more sought after for keynote or invited speeches in international conferences,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] and V1SH rises from being unpopular to being controversial.

[34] It is argued that if V1SH holds, then the framework to understand how our brain solves the vision problem should be substantially changed, as described by the Central-peripheral theory which in turn has its own experimental support.