[Face-research-list] introduction

[Gary Cottrell]

Hi -

I thought I would introduce myself to the list. I'm Gary Cottrell, and I've been building computational models (or my students have!) of visual processing for slightly over 20 years. My lab is interested in how the brain processes visual information from a number of perspectives - how do we recognize facial expressions, how do we recognize faces & objects, how do we decide where to look, how to we integrate information over fixations, what is the source of hemispheric asymmetries, what is the cause of search asymmetries? We've also investigated how hierarchical visual representations can be formed through unsupervised learning. I have a bad habit of publishing things in the cog sci conference and then not sending that to a journal, so some of my work is obscure, but it is all on my web page.

I'm also a member of the Perceptual Expertise Network, where I've mostly been interested in computational explanations of what I call the Visual Expertise Mystery, which is why would an area (the FFA) that presumably starts out as a face area become recruited for other areas of expertise? While a fair number of the readers of this list probably believe that that question starts from a false presupposition, we have a good computational answer, if you allow it the question! ;-)

I hope to see many of you at VSS!

cheers,
gary

Gary Cottrell 
858-534-6640 
FAX: 858-534-7029 
Computer Science and Engineering 0404
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"I am awaiting the day when people remember the fact that discovery does not work by deciding what you want and then discovering it."
-David Mermin


Email: gary at ucsd.edu
Home page: http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/~gary/