Mackenzie Sunday, Rankin McGugin and Isabel Gauthier, with the help of Cléo and Émile, taught visitors how to make their own composite and Thatcher faces (with good old paper, scissors and glue!)
Children and their parents could also test their perceptual expertise with faces, cars and birds, and see a visualization of what their brain activity could look like given their performance.
The web is a very strange place… The original Greeble work, covered in io9 in Feb 2015
Lab meeting guidelines
(prepared by Jackie Floyd, 9/25/2014)
Purpose:
Presenting data & brainstorming
Practice giving and receiving feedback
Dissemination of information
Encourage habits of thoughtfulness and thoroughness
Promotion of critical thinking and communication skills
Each of these things can be accomplished by sharing an article with the lab, sharing data from a recent study, or practicing before an upcoming presentation. You may also lead a discussion on a variety of topics important to the field or to research in general.
Choose an article that is both interesting to you and likely to generate a conversation. Examples include articles that introduce novel methodology, new directions, or connections to other areas of interest, or challenges to previous knowledge. “Classic” articles may also be a good choice; potentially leading to knew ideas by reminding us of the motivations behind older ones.
In preparation to present your chosen article, be sure to thoroughly read it in advance, including the supplemental materials (and in some cases, particularly important references). Try to anticipate possible questions or concerns and be prepared to address them.
When the time comes to present the article, begin by stating the overall goal(s)—why is this significant? Discuss the study design and method of analysis. Are the conclusions supported by the data? Was the question at hand answered? What are the limitations of the study? Advantages?
Do not rush through any part of this. Making sure that everyone understands what the goals are, and what motivated the present work, may take more time than you think. If you feel you will need to read parts of the paper to explain it, it may mean that you need organized notes to present it (since reading aloud the words that everyone can read tends to not be very helpful).
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Nobody should show up to lab meeting to be passive. You should have read anything that is assigned, and have a few questions written down. At the minimum, if the paper was really confusing to you, you should try to identify the first thing that is confusing and come ready to ask. Your goal should be to always leave lab meeting understanding the paper a little better then when you came in, and in some cases, to help others understand it better. This is still your responsibility even when you do not present yourself.
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Presenting empirical results at lab meetings is good practice for conferences or departmental talks. Your lab mates can provide you with valuable feedback and help build your confidence before your actual talk. Or, if you’re stalled in the development of an idea, your lab mates can serve as fresh eyes to help you see what you’re missing. For an hour-long meeting, keep your presentation between 35-45 minutes. This will allow time for any announcements beforehand, and for questions/discussion afterward.
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Since conducting research involves more than the gathering and publishing of data, it is valuable to hold some of our lab discussions on topics pertinent to all aspects of research. Consider one of the topics bellow:
-aspects of RCR
-job searches
-professionalism and ethics
-epistemological issues
-challenges in disseminating information
-service to profession/ outreach
-policy changes
Mini-Workshops
If you have strong skills in a particular area, a tutorial is another option. Even if you don’t necessarily possess these skills, if you have spent time gathering information regarding a particular subject, lab meeting may be the perfect place to share that information and give others the opportunity to provide input.
Examples:
-improving writing skills
-CV formatting
-best practices for figures and poster layout
-web presence
-new software
-job talks
-statistical issues like effect size, power, reliability…
Olivia Cheung has accepted an offer from NYU Abu Dhabi, will spend time in NYC preparing for the big move in August 2015. Congratulations Olivia!
Isabel receives a Chancellor Award for Research, for her work with Rankin McGugin, Chris Gatenby, and John Gore published in PNAS in 2012. And the second part of Rankin’s dissertation work was just accepted in Neuropsychologia!
McGugin, R.W., Gatenby,C, Gore, J.C., Gauthier, I. (2012). High-resolution imaging of expertise reveals reliable object selectivity in the FFA related to perceptual performance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(42), 17063-17068.
McGugin, R.W., Newton, A.T., Gore, J.C., Gauthier, I. (in press). Robust expertise effects in right FFA. Neuropsychologia.
David just accepted a Post doc position at The University of Massachusetts Amherst! He will begin in November.
We say goodbye to George Wang who is returning to Taiwan to finish his PhD after a year visiting at Vanderbilt, and working on projects having to do with perceptual expertise and holistic processing. We will miss George, and look forward to continuing to work with him and seeing him at conferences!
Ana Beth has recently accepted a position as Data Curation Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University in the University Libraries and through the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)! She will focus on data management in the brain sciences and will begin in September.
So proud and delighted to report that Ana Beth Van Gulick successfully defended her PhD dissertation on May 21st, presenting on The Semantic Vanderbilt Expertise Test (there is a longer title, but this is what you really need to remember!). Huge Congrats to AB!!
At VSS2014, Isabel presented a short talk in the exciting and dynamic Individual differences brown bag organized by Jeremy Wilmer. In two minutes, she could do little more than advertise two recent studies from the lab which should be very useful to anyone interested in measuring the failures of selective attention that are a facet of holistic processing. Cognitive psychologists often do not pay as much attention to issues of measurements as their colleagues in other fields of Psychology. Papers that focus on reliability or the magnitude of effect sizes are rare in our field. But like others working on high-level vision who have become recently more interested in individual differences, we have decided to invest more efforts into understanding our measures and so far, it has paid off. We hope this work will be useful to others as well.
Holistic processing is a hallmark of face recognition, and we focused on the composite task, using what Gauthier and Bukach (2007) called the “complete design” version of this paradigm (because it has ALL the possible congruent and incongruent trials rather than half of them as in what we called the “partial design” version of this task). In a recent review and meta-analysis of holistic face processing published in Psychological Bulletin, we explain the difference between the two tasks and present empirical evidence from many studies that the two tasks do not measure the same construct, that the partial design is correlated with response bias across studies (in addition to across subjects as we have shown before). We report on the meta-analytical effect size for the composite task, demonstrating that it is very sensitive in group studies, and offer some advice for maximizing reliability in individual difference studies. Indeed, in another paper recently accepted by Behavioral Research Methods, we quantify the reliability of measurements in this task across several studies, using both the standard subtraction approach, as well as the regression method advocated by Joe DeGutis and colleagues. We show the task often has low reliability regardless of the method used, and we achieve more acceptable levels of reliability using two different manipulations. Together, the two papers should provide a good example for readers to appreciate how the same task can have a large effect size for group studies and low reliability for individual differences (a situation that cognitive psychologists are not accustomed to thinking about, but which we suspect is not rare).
As a preview of things to come, we (Richler & Gauthier) have recently submitted a paper on a new test designed especially for the purpose of quantifying holistic process across individuals, which we argue is preferable on several fronts including reliability. As soon as the paper is accepted, we will make this test available to other scientists. UPDATE: the paper on the Vanderbilt Holistic Face Processing Test is now in press at JOV. Please contact us if you would like to use the test – we expect to have a JAVA version of it very soon, but we can share another version of the test in the mean time.