"A summary-statistic representation of peripheral vision explains visual crowding" was just accepted at the Journal of Vision. Lisa Nakano and Ruth Rosenholtz are co-authors on the manuscript. The paper describes work we've done suggesting that the information that is lost in visual crowding is the by-product of the visual system's use of a texture-like pooling of visual structure in the periphery. We introduce the use of images we call "mongrels" that are synthetic textures made from crowded arrays and demonstrate that these images contain roughly the same amount of information as the orginal crowded images. 

I received confirmation a few weeks ago that I'll be presenting some of my work describing ERP responses to own- and other-race faces at this year's OPAM workshop in Boston. The presentation is entitled "The role of face shape and pigmentation in modulating neural and behavioral
responses to other-race faces."

I have news from my collaborators at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston that our second paper describing our work using "digital surgery" to explore the perceptual consequences of face transplantation has been accepted in the Journal of Plastic, Reconstructive, and Aesthetic Surgery. The manuscript is entitled "Partial face transplantation: Age considerations for matching donors and recipients." Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, Dr. Pejman Aflaki, and Dr. Charles Nelson are all co-authors on the manuscript. 

After two years at Children's Hospital Boston, I've returned to my old stomping grounds at MIT to take another post-doctoral position with Nancy Kanwisher in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. I'm working with Nancy on a large-scale project to characterize the behavioral and neural phenotype of Autism Spectrum Disorder, which is a great opportunity to apply what I've learned about vision science, imaging, and development to a complex disorder and a multi-site research project. At the moment we're working on developing a sophisticated battery of perceptual and cognitive tasks

Our daughter Blaise's blog (which is at http://littleblaise.blogspot.com) is our main repository for updates on her care following her initial surgery just after birth, but yesterday was a big enough day that I wanted to put something here. Blaise underwent an 8-hour procedure yesterday to reconnect her GI tract, and happily it appears that she has substantially more healthy tissue than her doctors were aware of following her first operation. At present she's recovering in the Children's Hospital NICU and doing very well. We still need to be fairly cautious and watchful during her post-op recovery, but the discovery of more viable tissue is very good news. 

I recently had an article entitled "Using innate visual biases to guide face learning in natural scenes: A computational investigation" accepted for publication in Developmental Science. I'm pretty excited about this paper, since this is my first publication to appear in a developmental journal (with more to come, hopefully!). The main result is that "generic" visual biases for properties like symmetry and "top-heaviness" prove more successful than a face-specific "3-dot" template at locating faces in cluttered natural scenes. This paper's a solo effort, but I benefited a great deal from talking about this analysis with many of my colleagues at Children's and MIT. Thanks to everyone who offered advice on the analyses included in the paper and those brave souls who looked at early drafts.

Myself and Ruth Rosenholtz will be at the 13th annual ICCNS conference in Boston to talk about some of our recent modeling work that attempts to describe visual crowding in terms of texture processing. Our presentation is called "Visual crowding as texture perception: Analysis and synthesis" and will take place on May 29th.

I received word this week that my submissions to this year's meeting of the Vision Sciences Society in Naples, FL were accepted. The first is my own abstract, entitled "Using innate visual  biases to guide face learning in natural scenes: A computational investigation." The second is in collaboration with Ruth Rosenholtz and is entitled "A Crowded Model of Visual Search." Finally, the third abstract is in collaboration with Alvin Raj and Ruth Rosenholtz and is entitled "Texture processing model visualizes perception of Pinna-Gregory illusion." See you in Florida!