Good morning everyone

I'm very excited to be part of this list. As an introduction, I am Lisa Parr, working on comparative social cognition in nonhuman primates, evaluating species differences as a means for assessing human specializations. My take on social cognition has focused on how monkeys and apes process identity and expression from faces. I have been at the Yerkes National Primate Reserach Center in Atlanta, GA since 1992, when I joined the lab of Dr. Frans de Waal as a research technician. I graduated from Emory with a PhD in Psychology in 2000. My thesis explored emotional behavior and expression in chimpanzees. For the last several years, our work has been dedicated towards understanding similarities and differences in the face processing of chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys. Our subjects perform computerized tasks where they are required to match faces based on a number of dimensions. We have studied inversion effects, composite effects, individual recognition, specific changes in facial viewpoint, contrast reversal, thatcher illusions, expression and identity categorization and most recently we have been working with Peter and his team to identify the physical features that differentiate the faces of monkeys and apes differ using PCA analysis and face composites.

It might be interesting to some on this list that we have developed two nonhuman primate FACS systems, a ChimpFACS and a MaqFACS (rhesus macaques) in collaboration with researchers in both the US and UK. These can be found on my website.

http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~lparr/index.html

I'm looking forward to "meeting" and interacting with everyone.
sincerely
Lisa