Isabel Gauthier and Tom Palmeri are Co-PIs on a 2 years grant awarded by the NEA to study “whether visual art training can enhance visual perception and visual cognition”, in collaboration with Russell Davidson from the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo, NY.
Mackenzie Sunday became Dr. Sunday on May 3rd, 2019!
The lab just began work on our new NSF award “Replication of cortical microstructure correlations with face and object recognition” to advance our understanding of how the cortical microstructure of visual areas relates to individual differences in visual abilities.
Upon defending her thesis, Mackenzie Sunday will be doing a user experience research internship at the Google offices in Mountain View for 14 weeks.
Congrats Mackenzie, hope you have tons of fun!
Rankin McGugin (Co-investigators: Carissa Cascio, Allen Newton, Andrew Tomarken, Isabel Gauthier) has received an award in the amount of $17,130 from the Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical Translational Research to facilitate research on the Structural Correlates of Behavior in Autism Spectrum Disorder. The study will investigate the relation between the thickness of different cortical layers in the the Fusiform Face Area (FFA) and face and object recognition abilities.
Ting-Yun Chang was awarded a 2 years Government Scholarship to Study Abroad from the Ministry of Education of Taiwan, way to go Ting!
In a Neuroimage article, Martens et al. (2018) write:
“The perceptual process view sees expertise as a stimulus-driven, domain-general process, with expertise-related neural changes located in one specific region that encompasses the type of processing necessary for expert object recognition (Gauthier and Tarr, 1997). The expertise hypothesis, a more specific version, focuses on the relation between expertise and face processing. According to this hypothesis, FFA is the brain region in which “expert processing” takes place (Gauthier et al., 2000, 1999).” p.91.
This is an incorrect portraying of the expertise account discussed in these articles (or any that I have authored). Martens et al. seem to assume that we are looking for an answer to the question “where in the brain does expertise activate?”, to which we answer “the FFA”. But in reality, these studies of ours asked the specific question “What explains face-selectivity in the FFA?” to which we answered “Expertise individuating faces”. Accordingly, the expertise account of the specialization for faces in FFA does not propose that the same mechanisms account for selectivity in all brain areas that are face-selective, nor that all objects of expertise should engage the FFA, nor that the FFA is the only area that should be recruited by objects of expertise. Consulting the rest of our work on expertise in different domains, or comparing expertise with different tasks, should make this really clear. Other aspects of expertise, including the acquisition of non-visual semantic information or domain-specific skills involved in different kinds of expertise (e.g., reading musical notation or playing chess), are bound to engage a host of brain systems. For instance, in Martens et al. (2018), activation in experts who know the name of items is compared to activation in novices who do not know these names. Effects of expertise in the frontal lobe could very well reflect that naming – in any case, these effects are irrelevant to the expertise account of specialization in the FFA.
Martens, F., Bulthé, J., van Vliet, C., & de Beeck, H. O. (2018). Domain-general and domain-specific neural changes underlying visual expertise. NeuroImage, 169, 80-93.
Mackenzie was awarded the 2018 Pat Burns Graduate Student award from the Psychology department recognizing her productivity and the excellence of her work!
Mackenzie won “Best Student Poster” at the 2017 International Science of Learning Conference in Brisbane, Australia for her poster titled “Measuring domain-general familiar and novel object recognition ability using a latent-variable approach”. She attended the conference as part of a NSF-funded US delegation that also participated in workshops hosted by University of Queensland researchers.