Event overview
Goldsmiths Psychology Department Seminar Series
Abstract
Faces and voices convey much of the non-verbal information that we use when communicating with other people. We look at faces and listen to voices to recognise others, understand how they are feeling, and decide how to act. Recent research in my lab has used representational similarity analysis (RSA) to compare behavioural and neural representations across faces and voices. RSA is ideally suited to compare representational geometries derived from distinct input modalities. In this talk, I will focus on two main studies. In a first study (Kuhn et al., 2017), we found highly similar representations of emotion across facial and vocal stimuli, which suggest similar or shared coding mechanisms for emotion that may act independently of modality. In a second study, we used fMRI and RSA and found a region of the posterior STS that seems to contain modality-general representations of familiar people that can be similarly driven by faces and voices.
Biography
I studied Psychology at the University of Porto in Portugal. In 2004, I moved to London to do an MSc in Cognitive Neuropsychology and then a PhD in Psychology at University College London. After a postdoc in the Vision Sciences Lab at Harvard, I started my current lecturer position at Brunel in 2013. I am broadly interested in cognitive neuroscience and visual processing, and my research has focused in understanding the perceptual mechanisms that we use in our social interactions, such as how we recognise who someone is and how we infer their emotional states.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Feb 2018 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm |
Accessibility
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