Topic: facial features

Understanding how internally driven cognitive processes (COPs) give rise to behavior in different species is one of the key challenges in systems neuroscience. Traditionally, neuroscience has aimed to isolate individual COPs by simplifying sensory stimuli and behavioral readouts. Yet in natural behavior, several COPs can co-occur, often with overlapping neural representations. The dynamics of such superimposed COPs are yet to be understood, as well as the extent to which they generalize across species. To tackle this question, we developed a naturalistic Virtual Reality setup in which two spec

I describe a well-tested Python module that does automated alignment and warping of faces images, and some advantages over existing solutions. An additional tool I’ve developed does automated extraction of facial features, which can be used in a number of interesting ways. I illustrate the value of wavelet-based features with a brief description of 2 recent studies: perceptual in-painting, and the robustness of the whole-part advantage across a large stimulus set. Finally, I discuss the suitability of various deep learning models for generating stimuli to study perceptual face spaces. I belie

Prosopometamorphopsia (PMO) is a disorder characterized by face perception distortions. People with PMO see facial features that appear to melt, stretch, and change size and position. I'll discuss research on PMO carried out by my lab and others that sheds light on the cognitive and neural organization of face perception. https://facedistortion.faceblind.org/