Michael Tarr
Co-director, Center for Neural Basis of Cognition, Professor of Psychology:
Carnegie Mellon University
Phone:
michaeltarr@cmu.edu
Research interests are: visual object and face representation and recognition; perceptual categorization, learning, and expertise; how cognitive and perceptual knowledge interact; how the effects of illumination affect object perception and recognition; and visual navigation and scene representation in virtual environments.
Biography
As of September 2009, I will be moving to the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition as Co-Director and as a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University.
Interests
My research interests are: visual object and face representation and recognition; perceptual categorization, learning, and expertise; how cognitive and perceptual knowledge interact; how the effects of illumination affect object perception and recognition; and visual navigation and scene representation in virtual environments.
Research methods include: computer graphics psychophysics; functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI); event-related potentials (ERP); neuropsychology of brain-injured subjects; computational modeling and simulation; virtual reality; and neurophysiology (collaboratively only).
My research examines mechanisms of visual object representation, recognition, and categorization using psychophysical, neuroscientific, and computation methods. Questions that interest me include: How does the brain visually represent and recognize three-dimensional objects across dramatic changes in the two-dimensional retinal image, including variations produced by changes in viewpoint and illumination? What cognitive and neural mechanisms are used in acquisition of visual expertise and the ability to recognize objects at both highly specific and general categorical levels? How do we mentally represent and utilize information about the complex configurations of objects in scenes? As an example, consider that almost every pixel in an image of an object changes if there is a change in lighting direction. Yet, human observers are incredibly good at discounting this variation and successfully recognizing objects regardless of such changes.
My research suggests that high-level mental representations of objects include information about the effects of lighting. The reason for this is straightforward: lighting effects tell us something about the three-dimensional structure of objects and, thus, this information is valuable for recognition, particularly in the case of novel objects. We are currently pursuing how the visual system, which is encoding this highly variable information, compensates for the changes due to lighting that are likely to occur in the image.
In another project, several collaborators and I have been exploring how observers acquire visual expertise as a means for understanding the flexibility of the human visual system across a wide range of visual recognition tasks.
Degrees
PhD, 1989
Awards
2008 NIH EUREKA Award
2007-08 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
2007-08 James McKeen Cattell Fellowship (declined)
2006 Elected Fellow of the American Psychological Society
2003 Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences
1998 Finalist for the James S. McDonnell Centennial Fellowship
1997 American Psychological Association (APA) Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in the area of cognition/human learning
1993-94 Junior Faculty Fellowship, Yale University
1988-89 Whitaker College Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (competitive fellowship)
1987-89 James R. Killian Fellowship, MIT (competitive fellowship)
1987 Goodwin Medal Graduate Teaching Award Nominee, MIT
1984-87 National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship
Affiliations
VisionSciences Society
