Our Research
The human face is a captivating and compelling visual stimulus that provides us an entry point into our interactions with others. From the face, we can perceive a unique identity, a gender, an ethnicity/race and an approximate age. We can remember hundreds, if not thousands, of individual faces. As the face changes, it provides us with moment-to-moment emotional and social signals in the form of facial expressions and gestures. These signals guide us through social interactions and help us to form memories.
In our research, we study human perception and memory for faces , bodies, and people, using methods from experimental psychological, computational vision, and cognitive neuroscience. The projects in our lab can be divided into categories. The first includes studies of human perception and memory for faces, bodies, and people. The second involves the study of visual representations formed by state-of-the-art face recognition algorithms, based on deep convolutional neural networks. In the third category, we are conducting studies comparing face recognition experts, untrained people, and algorithms on face identification tasks.
See all of our individual research projects.
(Top) Yolanda (Ivette) Colon; (Left to right) Asal Baragchizadeh, Victoria Huang, Gerie Jeckeln, Matt Hill, Connor Parde, Jackie Cavazos, Snipta Mallick, Ying (Nina) Hu; (Center) Alice O’Toole and Glen
News
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July 2023
Congratulations to Jacqueline Cavazos! Her paper “Accuracy Comparison Across Face Recognition Algorithms: Where Are We on Measuring Race Bias?,” IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior and Identity Science, Vol. 3, No. 1, January 2021. was just selected for the IEEE Biometrics Council Transactions on Biometrics Behavior & Identity Science Best Paper Award.
Matt Hill just successfully defended his dissertation: Deep Convolutional Neural Network Encoding of Face Shape and Reflectance in Synthetic Face Images.
January 2023
Connor Parde defended his dissertation: Face identity likeness insights for the study of face perception. He is now working at eXponent, NY.
Jackie Cavazos successfully defended her Dissertation: Does Race Matter? Testing Parameters for Collaboration Benefits of Face Identification Accuracy. She has joined the lab of Dr. Nia Dowell at the University of California at Irvine as a post-doctoral fellow, funding by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Congratulations Dr. Jackie!
Lab alumnus Dr. Carina Amanda Hahn was awarded gold medal from the Dept. of Commerce for her work in face recognition at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Congratulations to Ying “Nina” Hu for being the recipient of the Matthew S. Perry Fellowship in Cognition and Neuroscience!
Ivette Colon is now a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Best of luck Ivette, you will be missed!
Asal Baragchizedeh successfully defended her dissertation proposal title “The Role of Biological Motion in Identity Representations: Mechanism of the Integration of Body Form and Body Motion in Person Identification”. Congratulations Asal!
Connor Parde’s abstract was accepted for a talk at the British Psychological Society — Cognition Section Meeting and to the From Neuroscience to Artificially Intelligent Systems, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory!
Connor Parde was invited to give a talk for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Postdoctoral and Early-career Association of Researchers. Well done Connor!
Jackie Cavazos successfully defended her Dissertation Proposal: Does Race Matter? Testing Parameters for Collaboration Benefits of Face Identification Accuracy. Congratulations Jackie!
Jackie Cavazos was invited to give a talk at the Demographic Variation in the Performance of Biometric Systems Workshop for the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision in Aspen, CO.
Victoria Huang received the Patti Henry Pinch Scholarship for Undergraduate Research and the Santrock Undergraduate Travel Award. Congrats Victoria!
Parisa Jesudasen received the Patti Henry Pinch Scholarship for Undergraduate Research. Nice job Parisa!
Check out Alice O’Toole’s discussion on human vs machine facial recognition in The Promise and Perils of Facial Recognition, SciLine AAAS!
Ying (Nina) Hu published a paper titled Integrating faces and bodies: Psychological and neural perspectives on whole person perception in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. Congratulations!
Connor Parde’s abstract, Integrating Single-Unit and Pattern Codes in DCNNs Trained for Face Identification, was accepted for a talk at the 20th annual Vision Sciences Society meeting. Congrats Connor!
Asal Baragchizadeh, Yolanda (Ivette) Colon, Ying (Nina) Hu, Gerie Jeckeln, and Jackie Cavazos each had their abstracts accepted for poster presentations at the 20th annual Vision Sciences Society meeting. Nicely done everyone!
Matt Hill published a paper in Nature Machine Intelligence titled Deep convolutional neural networks in face of caricature. Congrats!
Victoria Huang and Snipta Mallick join the Face Perception Research Lab. Welcome!
Congratulations to Connor Parde who received the 2019 Carol L. and Maynard S. Redeker Fellowship!
Ying (Nina) Hu received the 2019 Bio-Behavioral Sciences Research Award. Congratulations!
Connor Parde published a paper in Cognitive Science titled Social Trait Information in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Trained for Face Identification. Congrats!