Department of
Psychological and Brain Sciences

• Sensation and Perception
• Psychophysics

• pattern vision
• object and face recognition
• perceptual learning
• perceptual grouping and completion
• visual memory
• encoding efficiency and information use
• ideal observer theory

One of the most important abilities we possess is our capacity to detect, discriminate and identify objects in our environment. It is difficult to imagine navigating through the world without the ability to reliably detect objects in our path; or having social interactions without the ability to recognize other people's faces. These are tasks that we perform with ease and on a continual basis every day. But how does our visual system translate the array of light that reaches our eyes into an organized representation of meaningful objects embedded within complex scenes?

My research is directed towards understanding some of these processes that are performed on visual patterns after the initial stages of sensory encoding. I am particularly interested in understanding what it is that limits our ability to use the information that is available to us when we are trying to detect or recognize visual patterns. My approach typically involves the use of a variety of psychophysical and signal-processing methods (such as ideal observer analysis and signal detection theory) to quantitatively characterize the mechanisms involved in various perceptual processes, such as perceptual learning, visual completion, face recognition and visual memory decay.

in press - Gold, J.M., Tadin, D., Cook, S.C. & Blake, R. (in press). The efficiency of biological motion perception. Perception & Psychophysics.

2006 - Conrey, B. & Gold, J.M. (2006). An ideal observer analysis of variability in visual-only speech. Vision Research, 46, 3243-3258.

2006 - Gold, J.M., Cohen, A. & Shiffrin R. (2006) Visual noise reveals category representations. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13 (4), 649-655.

2006 - Gold, J.M. & Shubel, E. (2006). The spatiotemporal properties of visual completion measured by response classification. Journal of Vision, 6 (4), 356-365.

2005 - Gold, J.M., Sekuler, R., Murray, R.F., Sekuler, A.B., & Bennett, P.J. (2005). Visual memory decay is deterministic. Psychological Science, 16 (10), 769-774.

2004 - Sekuler, A.B., Gaspar, C.G., Gold, J.M., & Bennett, P.J. (2004). Inversion leads to quantitative, not qualitative, changes in face processing. Current Biology, 14, 391-396.

2000 - Gold, J.M., Murray, R.F., Bennett, P.J. & Sekuler, A.B. (2000) Deriving behavioral receptive fields for visually completed contours. Current Biology, 10, 663-666.

1999 - Gold, J.M., Bennettm P.J. & Sekulerm A.B. (1999) Signal but not noise changes with perceptual learning. Nature, 402, 176-178.

1999 - Gold, J.M., Bennett, P.J. & Sekuler, A.B. (1999) Identification of band-pass filtered letters and faces by human and ideal observers. Vision Research, 39(21), 3537-3560.

• IU Cognitive Science Homepage
• Dr. Gold's Vision Lab Homepage