[1][citation needed] He received his undergraduate degree in biochemistry at the University of California, Davis, in 1973, working in the laboratory of Prof. Robert Scobey over two summers.
He has served as principal or co-investigator on dozens of grants, raising millions of dollars for basic and applied research in the visual neurosciences.
[2] Early work centered on the discovery and elucidation of cortical gain fields, a general rule of multiplicative computation used by many areas of the cortex.
[3][4] Andersen and Zipser of UCSD developed one of the first neural network models of cortical function, which generated a mathematical basis for testing hypotheses based on laboratory findings.
[9] He found that the perception of the direction of heading, important for navigation, is computed in the brain using both visual stimuli and eye movement signals.