Jeff Nador

University of Fribourg · Département de psychologie

Studies of facial identity processing typically assess perception (via matching) and/or memory (via recognition), with experimental designs differing with respect to one important aspect: Target Prevalence. Some designs include “target absent” (TA) among “target present” (TP) trials. In visual search tasks, TA trials shift an observer’s decisional...

Rossion et al. (2020) review over a decade of work investigating the neural basis of unfamiliar face individuation (FI)—the brain's ability to distinguish unfamiliar face identity—using fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS). Though FPVS measures rapid, automatic processing, its value for studying vision and face cognition could be increased by ad...

Studies of facial identity processing typically assess perception and/or recognition, with designs differing with respect to one important aspect: Target Prevalence. That is, some include “target absent” (TA) among “target present” (TP) trials. In visual search tasks, TA trials shift an observer’s decisional criterion towards a stricter one, increa...

Accurate face identity processing (FIP) is a critical component of security professions. Unfortunately, however, rapid face matching as required in real-life situations such as passport controls cannot be improved via training. While here accuracy is a high priority, it is neither the only, nor most important performance-measure. Officers must proc...

Accurate face identity processing (FIP) is a critical component of security professions, but unfortunately cannot be improved via training. While accuracy is a high priority, it is neither the only, nor most important performance-measure. Passport control officers must process high-throughput information as efficiently as possible – accurately and...

Facial identity matching ability varies widely, ranging from prosopagnosic individuals (who exhibit profound impairments in face cognition/processing) to so-called super-recognizers (SRs), possessing exceptional capacities. Yet, despite the often consequential nature of face matching decisions—such as identity verification in security critical sett...

A face’s memorability refers to the unique combination of its intrinsic visual features facilitating its later recognition. Despite considerable variation in face recognition ability amongst the general population, individuals show substantial concordance regarding the memorability of various faces. And, when the viewpoints across which identities...

Facial identity matching ability varies widely, ranging from severely deficient prosopagnosics (who exhibit profound impairments in face cognition) to so-called Super-Recognizers (SRs), possessing exceptional capacities for processing facial identity. Yet, despite the often consequential nature of face matching decisions—such as identity verificati...

Rossion et al. (2020) review over a decade of work investigating the neural basis of unfamiliar face individuation (FI) ‐ the brain’s ability to distinguish unfamiliar face identity ‐ using fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS). Though FPVS measures rapid, automatic processing, its value for studying vision and face cognition could be increased b...

People are often considered cognitive misers. When given a free choice between two tasks, people tend to choose tasks requiring less cognitive effort. Such demand avoidance (DA) is associated with cognitive control, but it is still not clear to what extent individual differences in cognitive control can account for variations in DA. We sought to el...

Over the last decade, the efforts toward unraveling the complex interplay between the brain, body, and environment have set a promising line of research that utilizes neuroscience to study human performance in natural work contexts such as aviation. Thus, a relatively new discipline called neuroergonomics is holding the promise of studying the neur...

Recent work studying the temporal dynamics of visual scene processing (Harel et al., 2016) has found that global scene properties (GSPs) modulate the amplitude of early Event-Related Potentials (ERPs). It is still not clear, however, to what extent the processing of these GSPs is influenced by their behavioral relevance, determined by the goals of...

Previous research has demonstrated that applying onset transients to crowded targets can improve their orientation discriminability (Greenwood, Sayim & Cavanagh, 2014), but does not influence the spatial extent of flanker interference (critical spacing). At last year's VSS, we argued that this effect depends on observers' endogenous attention to th...

Previous research has demonstrated that applying onset transients to crowded targets can improve their orientation discriminability (Greenwood, Sayim & Cavanagh, 2014). We replicate this finding, but specify that the advantage conferred by onset transients occurs only 1) when there is a pre-existing feature contrast between the target and flankers...

Background / Purpose: Previous research suggests that targets remain uncrowded when at least one feature distinguishes them from their flankers. While spatial properties of crowding have been studied in detail, the time course of crowding remains unknown. We studied the time course of crowding, using a new cueing paradigm. Main conclusion: Our...

Note: Title changed for data of presentation. "Feature Attention Un-Crowds by Supplementing Spatial Attention" Jeff Nador, Jiehui Qian and Yury Petrov It is known that target pop-out reduces crowding (Kooi et al., 1994; Poder, 2006) and, conversely, target-flanker grouping increases it (Sayim et al., 2011). This indicates that global rather than...

It is known that neural responses become less dependent on the stimulus size and location along the visual pathway. This study aimed to use this property to find evidence of neural feedback in visually evoked potentials (VEP). High-density VEPs evoked by a contrast reversing checkerboard were collected from 15 normal observers using a 128-channel E...

Background / Purpose: In a recent fMRI study (1), it was found that the pattern of activation in the early visual cortex to an identified two-tone “Mooney” image of an object was more similar to the response to its full grayscale image than to the same two-tone image when it was not identified. This study explores the effects of high-level image...

It has been known from animal neurophysiology that (i) receptive field sizes increase, and (ii) effects of stimulus contrast decrease (response saturation) along the visual pathway. The purpose of our study was two-fold. First, we wanted to confirm these properties of visual neurons for human brain. Second, we exploited these properties to reveal s...