| |
     |
|
In engineering I studied wide bandgap semiconductors (specifically, the nitride family) for use in high-power, high-speed devices and circuits as well as blue lasers, blue LEDs and high-efficiency solar energy harvesting materials. Needless to say I was not overly passionate about this work. I am not disappointed with my time in engineering. Rather, I appreciate the detailed and vast background into many of the physical and mathematical concepts that drive my current research.
In psychology I am interested in many topics. My previous and current research focuses on human face recognition and perceptual learning. I am interested in which parts of the face are the most important for identification (such as the eyes). This topic encompasses a vast literature. However, I am looking into a novel concept: how well can humans learn to use an unfamiliar feature (such as the chin) for identification when the normally diagnostic features contain no discriminating information? How do humans adapt perceptual and decision strategies? Compared to an ideal observer, how efficient are humans at the recognition task, and how efficiently can humans learn to use a new feature? How do these results fit with our real world experience with actual faces? Can a disparity in efficiency help explain well-known recognition impairments such as the same-race effect?
Currently I am looking into the psychophysics of this topic, modeling human performance and strategy and explaining inefficiencies in the perceptual system. I would like to expand this line of research into the physiological regime; specifically, looking at changes in neurological components with learning (for instance, the N170 face effect with ERP and the role of the fusiform face area (FFA) with fMRI). Soon I will also be introducing an eye-tracking study to monitor the overt attentional strategy shifts as a function of learning.
A new interest of mine lies with the role of reward in perception and decision processes. Reward is an ambiguous term that can refer to neuromodulators (such as the dopamine system) and explicit environmental guerdons (such as juice or money). Dr. Jason Droll and I are exploring avenues of inquiry into the modulation of perceptual decisions by reward structures. This subject falls into the broad topic of cutely termed neuroeconomics.
|
|
