Jim Tanaka: Facing up to Autism, New Tools for Different Minds
Dr. Jim Tanaka is a Professor of Psychology and co-Director of the Brain and Cognition at the University of Victoria. His work in autism explores the use of interactive media to help children with autism spectrum disorder develop their social and emotional abilities.
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ABOUT Jim Tanaka
“Jim Tanaka’s research examines the cognitive and neurological processes underlying object and face recognition.
A central question in his research concerns the role that experience and biology plays in the way we recognise objects. Visual Cognition Lab (VizCogLab) are currently approaching this question from two perspectives.
First, they are studying the recognition processes of object experts, such as expert biologists, dog experts, and bird experts, to see whether experts recognise objects in their domain of expertise differently than novices.
Second, they are examining the visual processes that mediate face recognition. It has been claimed that face recognition is a type of recognition in which all people are experts. As a form of expertise, we might expect face recognition to share similar processes as those found for other types of expert object recognition e.g.birdwatching, or car identification.
These questions are examined using converging experimental approaches that include behavioural measures, event-related potentials and the study of brain-damaged patients. In more recent work, Jim and the VizCogLab team are applying the principles of perceptual expertise to teach children with autism how to recognise faces.
By drawing parallels and contrasts between face recognition and expert object recognition, they hope to better understand how experience shapes the way we perceive and recognise objects in the world.”
The VIDEO
