|
Research
|
News
|
Links
|
| Welcome to the Object Perception and Learning lab at Temple! No matter what you do for work or fun, chances are that you rely on a degree of visual expertise every day. As one example of "visual expertise", imagine a surgical pathologist whose job it is to scan tissue samples for disease. To most of us, the tissue samples might look like undifferentiated blobs, but the trained eye can see things that the novice eye simply can't. What changes occur in the brain and what visual strategies does one learn as a person becomes a visual expert? This is the question driving most of the research we do in our lab. Although the example of a surgical pathologist can seem highly specialized, many of us are visual experts in domains that we take for granted. For example, our ability to recognize countless faces can be considered a form of visual expertise; to understand just how special it is, consider children with autism who often have great difficulty processing facial information. Through our research, we aim to gain insight not only into when visual learning succeeds, but also when visual learning fails to develop normally. |