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Tanaka and Weiskopf flank the lab mascot, Mr. Potato Head, at the lab's blob-filled whiteboard. PHOTOGRAPH BY LINDA GRASHOFF
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Oberlin Psychology Professor Takes Students into Nationwide Collaborative Research under $1.5 Million Grant
By Gail Taylor
These blobs come from
two families. Can you tell which are from Family A and which are from
Family B? Scroll down
for the answer.
The top blob is in Family A; all the other blobs are in Family B.
SEPTEMBER 6, 2000--Oberlin senior Dan Weiskopf and other members of the Visual Cognition Laboratory at Oberlin College will have the chance to collaborate with researchers from around the country, thanks to a $1.5 million grant to a network of scientists studying human expertise in object recognition. The grant includes $40,000 to James Tanaka, associate professor of psychology.
Tanaka's portion of the McDonnell Foundation award will augment a current National Science Foundation grant of $234,000, which otherwise supports his research. Oberlin facilities funded by the grants include the Visual Cognition Laboratory, where Weiskopf and six other students help Tanaka design computer-based protocols for studying how the brain operates when people develop expertise.
Through the new grant, researchers from across the country and a variety of disciplines will share access to equipment and to research subjects--including autistic patients. The grant includes funding for researchers and their assistants to meet as a group and to travel to each other's labs for consultation. Participants come from Vanderbilt, Brown, Carnegie Mellon, and Yale universities; and the universities of Victoria, California at San Diego, and Colorado at Boulder. Oberlin is the only undergraduate college represented.
Weiskopf, who comes from Baltimore, combines a conservatory major in trombone with a college independent major in cognitive science. His work in Tanaka's lab focuses on developing computer-generated "blobs" that can be sorted into related "families" but differentiated one from another within family.
Experiments with Oberlin undergraduates show, says Tanaka, that subjects can be trained as blob experts. Training in differentiating the blobs produces the same kind of immediate recognition that takes place when a bird expert identifies a bird, or a dog expert identifies a dog.
Tanaka and a colleague at Case Western Reserve University have shown that bird and dog experts manifest recognition through increased brain activity (measurable by an electroencephalogram, or EEG) at a particular location related to the visual cortex (the region where visual signals are processed).
The work with bird and dog experts "suggests that experience changes the way the expert perceives the world in the visual domain," Tanaka says. "There's a change in the neurological process."
Using Oberlin's blobs, researchers will be able to study development of expertise over time. (Bird and dog experts come to the lab having already acquired their expertise.) Blobs, says Tanaka, have an experimental advantage over faces--a frequent focus of cognitive studies--in that the blobs are unlikely to evoke an emotional response.
Tanaka's lab will share Oberlin's blobs and training protocols throughout the researchers' network--including with scientists who work with autistic patients.
Researchers on autism--a condition that includes difficulty reading and responding to facial expressions--have pursued two lines of thought. One view suggests that an autistic person doesn't learn about faces because he or (less often) she is not interested in them. Alternate thinking suggests a generalized impairment in the cognitive processes involved in object expertise.
When normal people look at faces, Tanaka says, they show increased brain activity in the region where experts show increased activity when they look at the objects of their expertise. Work with autistic patients has shown that when they look at faces, no corresponding activation takes place. Rather, autistic patients looking at faces show enhanced activity in brain areas activated in normal people when looking at objects about which they lack expertise.
Tanaka and Weiskopf hope Oberlin's blob protocols--by allowing quick training of experts and easy manipulation of their objects of expertise--will help colleagues learn more about normal brain function and someday, perhaps, design new ways to help people who are neurologically impaired.
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