Publications by authors named "James Tanaka"

Saccadic choice tasks use eye movements as a response method, typically in a task where observers are asked to saccade as quickly as possible to an image of a prespecified target category. Using this approach, face-selective saccades have been observed within 100 ms poststimulus. When taking into account oculomotor processing, this suggests that faces can be detected in as little as 70 to 80 ms.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates how face recognition abilities change with age, focusing on both holistic (recognizing the whole face) and featural (recognizing individual parts) processing in face memory.
  • It involved 3,341 participants aged 18-69 and revealed that while recognition of eye regions declines starting in the 50s, recognition of mouth regions and overall holistic advantage remains stable across ages.
  • The research also found that men experienced a steeper decline in eye recognition compared to women, suggesting potential reasons behind this age-related decline, including shifts in attention due to hearing loss and the age-related positivity effect affecting emotional recognition.
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A hallmark of expert object recognition is rapid and accurate subordinate-category recognition of visually homogenous objects. However, the perceptual strategies by which expert recognition is achieved is less known. The current study investigated whether visual expertise changes observers' perceptual field (e.

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In our commentary, we propose that the ORE can be viewed as a form of perceptual expertise. Like experts, we recognize own-race faces at the subordinate level as individuals and novices when recognize other-race faces at the basic level of race. Applying a perceptual expertise account, we explain the ORE in terms of its cognitive, neural, and motivational factors.

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Autism traits are common exclusionary criteria in developmental prosopagnosia (DP) studies. We investigated whether autism traits produce qualitatively different face processing in 43 DPs with high vs. low autism quotient (AQ) scores.

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People are increasingly accessing their own laboratory (lab) results online. However, Canadians may be expected to use different systems to access their results, depending upon where they are tested (e.g.

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Previous work suggests that subordinate-level object training improves exemplar-level perceptual discrimination over basic-level training. However, the extent to which visual fixation strategies and the use of visual features, such as color and spatial frequency (SF), change with improved discrimination was not previously known. In the current study, adults (n = 24) completed 6 days of training with 2 families of computer-generated novel objects.

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Integration of multi-omics data improved prediction accuracies of oat agronomic and seed nutritional traits in multi-environment trials and distantly related populations in addition to the single-environment prediction. Multi-omics prediction has been shown to be superior to genomic prediction with genome-wide DNA-based genetic markers (G) for predicting phenotypes. However, most of the existing studies were based on historical datasets from one environment; therefore, they were unable to evaluate the efficiency of multi-omics prediction in multi-environment trials and distantly related populations.

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Positional-based cloning is a foundational method for understanding the genes and gene networks that control valuable agronomic traits such as grain yield components. In this study, we sought to positionally clone the causal genetic variant of a 1000-grain weight (TGW) quantitative trait loci (QTL) on wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) chromosome arm 5AL.

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While motion information is important for the early stages of vision, it also contributes to later stages of object recognition. For example, human observers can detect the presence of a human, judge its actions, and judge its gender and identity simply based on motion cues conveyed in a point-light display. Here we examined whether object expertise enhances the observer's sensitivity to its characteristic movement.

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While it has been established that expression perception is rapid, it is unclear whether early appraisal mechanisms invoke holistic perception. In the current study, we defined gist perception as the appraisal of a stimulus within a single glance (<125 ms). We employed the expression composite task used previously by Tanaka and colleagues in a 2012 study, with several critical modifications: (i) we developed stimuli that eliminated contrast artifacts, (ii) we employed a masking technique to abolish low-level cues, and (iii) all the face stimuli were composite stimuli compared to mix of natural and composite stimuli previously used.

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Previous studies have focused on the modulatory effects of face familiarity on different components of an event-related potential (ERP), but there is controversy in the literature regarding the precise component that reflects the process of identity recognition. This may be partly explained by limits to this waveform analysis approach, as waveforms elicited by the presentation of a face are likely to reflect a variety of different cognitive processes that overlap in time. Using fast periodic visual stimulation and EEG (FPVS-EEG), we directly measured the electrophysiological response reflecting identity-specific recognition after isolating it from responses attributable to low-level visual processing and face-selective processes that are not identity-specific.

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Although there is empricial support for the old adage that "we never forget a face" (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 104 (1975) 54-75), the cognitive processes responsible for our long-term face memories are not well understood. By manipulating the upright and inverted orientation of faces during encoding and retrieval, we investigated the influence of holistic processing on our ability to recognize faces stored in long-term memory. In Experiment 1, participants were trained to identify 12 novel upright faces (six male, six female) by name (e.

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While expert face discrimination develops naturally in humans, expert discrimination in non-face object categories, such as birds, cars and dogs, is acquired through years of experience and explicit practice. The current study used an implicit visual discrimination paradigm and electroencephalography (EEG) - Fast Periodic Visual Stimulation - to examine whether within-category discrimination of faces and non-face objects of expertise rely on shared mechanisms despite their distinct learning histories. Electroencephalogram was recorded while bird experts and bird novices viewed 60 s sequences of bird images or face images presented at a periodic rate of six images per second (i.

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The current study examined the role of color and spatial frequency on the early acquisition of perceptual expertise after one week of laboratory training with bird stimuli. Participants learned to categorize finches (or warblers) at the subordinate species level (e.g.

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Many medical professions require practitioners to perform visual categorizations in domains such as radiology, dermatology, and neurology. However, acquiring visual expertise is tedious and time-consuming and the perceptual strategies mediating visual categorization skills are poorly understood. In this paper, the Ease algorithm was developed to predict an item's categorization difficulty (Ease value) based on the item's perceptual similarity to all within-category items versus between-category items in the dataset.

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A hallmark of a perceptual expert is the ability to detect and categorize stimuli in their domain of expertise after brief exposure. For example, expert radiologists can differentiate between "abnormal" and "normal" mammograms after a 250 ms exposure. It has been speculated that rapid detection depends on a global analysis referred to as holistic perception.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study examined face processing in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and typically developing participants using behavioral tests and brain activity measurements.
  • ASD participants scored significantly lower on the Cambridge Face Memory Test compared to neurotypical norms, indicating difficulty in face memory.
  • Brain responses to faces showed no significant differences between the ASD and control groups, suggesting that initial face perception and memory processes are independent in ASD individuals.
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The face-inversion effect is the finding that picture-plane inversion disproportionately impairs face recognition compared to object recognition and is now attributed to greater orientation-sensitivity of holistic processing for faces but not common objects. Yet, expert dog judges have showed similar recognition deficits for inverted dogs and inverted faces, suggesting that holistic processing is not specific to faces but to the expert recognition of perceptually similar objects. Although processing changes in expert object recognition have since been extensively documented, no other studies have observed the distinct recognition deficits for inverted objects-of-expertise that people as face experts show for faces.

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Using a composite-face paradigm, we examined the holistic processing induced by Asian faces, Caucasian faces, and monkey faces with human Asian participants in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to judge whether the upper halves of two faces successively presented were the same or different. A composite-face effect was found for Asian faces and Caucasian faces, but not for monkey faces.

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Perceptual expertise is marked by subordinate-level recognition of objects in the expert domain. In this study, participants learned one family of full-color, artificial objects at the subordinate (species) level and another family at the basic (family) level. Discrimination of trained and untrained exemplars was tested before and after training across several image manipulations [full-color, grayscale, low spatial frequency (LSF) and high spatial frequency (HSF)] while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded.

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A growing body of literature suggests that human individuals differ in their ability to process face identity. These findings mainly stem from explicit behavioral tasks, such as the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT). However, it remains an open question whether such individual differences can be found in the absence of an explicit face identity task and when faces have to be individualized at a single glance.

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It has been claimed that faces are recognized as a "whole" rather than by the recognition of individual parts. In a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology in 1993, Martha Farah and I attempted to operationalize the holistic claim using the part/whole task. In this task, participants studied a face and then their memory presented in isolation and in the whole face.

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Novices recognize objects at the basic-category level (e.g., dog, chair, and bird) at which identification is based on the global form of the objects (Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, & Boyes-Braem, 1976).

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