- Ph.D., the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, 2001

Thomas James
Professor, Psychological And Brain Sciences
Professor, Psychological And Brain Sciences
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.
Ventral occipital lesions impair object recognition but not object‐directed grasping: an fMRI study (2003)
Thomas W James, Jody Culham, G Keith Humphrey, A David Milner and Melvyn A Goodale
Brain, 126 (11), 2463-2475
Author | Dissertation Title | Committee |
---|---|---|
Kim, SunAh | Neural Mechanisms of Multisensory Visuo-Haptic Object Recognition (August 2010) | James, T. (Chair), Puce, A. (Co-Chair), Craig, J., James, K. |
Klein, Krystal | Vocabulary Acquisition via Cross-Situational Learning (December 2009) | Yu, C. (Chair), Shiffrin, R., James, K., Smith, L. |
Lee, Sungyoung | Understanding Available Resources During TV Message Processing: Audio/Video Redundancy, Emotion, Structural Complexity, and Motivated Cognition (August 2009) | Lang, A. (Co-Chair), James, T. (Co-Chair), Potter, R., Fox, J. |
Lee, Young Lim | Metric Shape Can Be Perceived Accurately And Used Both For Object Recognition and Visually Guided Action (September 2009) | Bingham, G. (Co-Chair), Busey, T., James, T. (Co-Chair), Hanson, A (Co-Chair). |
Nelson, Angela | Examining the Co-Evolution of Knowledge and Event Memory (August 2009) | Shiffrin, R. (Co-Chair), Goldstone, R. (Co-Chair), Busey, T., James, K. |
Stanton, Roger | Dissociations of Classification: Evidence against the Multiple Learning-Systems Hypothesis (August 2007) | Nosofsky, R. (Chair), Goldstone, R., James, T., Kruschke, J. |