Thomas James: Cognitive Science Program: Indiana University Bloomington
Field of study
- Object recognition and representation
Education
- Ph.D., the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, 2001
Research interests
- My research is involved with discovering the neural mechanisms underlying human object recognition and representation. I use a combination of experimental techniques, including functional MRI and psychophysics to explore these questions. I see object representations as multi-sensory. In other words, object representations are sensory in nature, as opposed to being amodal constructs, and object representations are not uni-sensory (e.g., purely visual). Multi-sensory object representations are conceived as an ecological solution for various cognitive phenomena such as object perception and memory and the storage and retrieval of semantic knowledge.
- Facilities
- The Perception and Neuroimaging (PAN) laboratory is housed within the Psychology Building. In addition to psychophysics testing rooms, we have access to the on-site 3T Siemens functional MRI facility. This allows the use of multiple techniques (i.e., behavior and neuroimaging) to address questions, which is one of the foundations of cognitive neuroscience.