Benjamin Balas

Welcome!

I am a vision scientist working in Dr. Nancy Kanwisher's lab in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. I investigate the perception and recognition of faces, objects, and textures. My work combines computer vision, machine learning, psychophysics, and electrophysiology to study how children and adults recognize the people and things around them. My goal is to understand what visual information we use to make complex decisions about the world we see.
Benjamin Balas, Ph. D‎ > ‎News‎ > ‎

New Manuscript

posted ‎‎Oct 10, 2009 6:12 AM‎‎ by Benjamin Balas
My article entitled "The role of face shape and pigmentation in other-race face perception: An electrophysiological study" has just been accepted for publication in Neuropsychologia. Dr. Charles A. Nelson is a co-author on the manuscript. The paper describes an ERP study I carried out at Children's Hospital Boston in which I measured the neural response to computer-generated faces of different races. The key contribution in the paper is the dissociation of race-specific face shape and skin color, making it possible to determine how each cue to racial category independently contributes to the ERP response.