Research Interests

I maintain an active interest in several different areas that are summarized below. See my publications page for specific papers associated with each topic.

Fingerprint Identification

When experts examine thousands of prints, their visual systems may undergo profound changes that may help them extract information from a noisy or degraded fingerprint. For information about our work on these experts, click here.

Face Recognition

How are faces represented in memory? What processes are used to access this information? I have been working with morphs to construct stimuli with known properties to probe how people access memory during face recognition. A description of one particularly cool experiment can be found here.

Memory and Metacognition

What is the relation between memory accuracy and confidence? This become especially important during eyewitness testimony and identification. We've been looking at this topic by taking standard memory experiment designs and manipulating environmentally valid variables like duration, luminance and rehearsal. One particularly cool experiment can be found here.

Temporal Order Judgments

Working with Jim Craig, we have looked at how temporal order judgments are influenced by motion applied to the individual dots. This irrelevant motion can take performance from 90% to chance. A java-based demonstration can be found here.

EEG Brainwave Recording

We have a number of experiments that look at the processes that underlie perceptual processes. We're particularly interested in face recognition and related perceptual processes. The description of one experiment can be found here.

Temporal Integration and Information Processing

When a stimulus is presented to the visual system, it responds as quickly as it can. However, its response will necessarily be delayed, and the resulting temporal smearing has important consequences for later processing. Consult the publications index for a list of articles relating to Temporal Integration and Temporal Summation.

Visual Attention

Filling a display with items often increases search time when you look for a known item. In a series of experiments with John Palmer, we've looked at whether unlimited capacity independent processing models can be applied to localization, identification and 2-alternative forced choice tasks. A paper can be found here.

Software for Cognitive Science

I'm a co-PI on a grant from the National Science foundation to write software for cognitive science. An example java web experiment can be found here.