Forskningsprofil

Research areas: Visual cognition, learning processes and knowledge organization examined in both neurotypicals and neurodiverse populations (developmental conditions and individuals with brain injury) using traditional experimental methods in cognitive psychology as well as functional imaging and neuropsychological case studies.

Main scientific contribution: The development of a general theory of visual object recognition (PACE), which covers and integrates a large body of empirical evidence obtained in the fields of neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, neuroimaging, and neurology. The theory was originally developed to explain how different categories of objects (natural objects and artefacts) are processed differently by neurologically intact subjects, yielding so-called category-effects in visual object recognition, and how this may explain why patients following brain damage may be able to recognize some categories of objects but not others. More recently, I have shown that PACE can also account for the combined effects of visual similarity and visual complexity in classical object recognition paradigms, central aspects of developmental prosopagnosia  – a disorder characterized by profound and lifelong difficulties with face recognition in the absence of any sensory or intellectual deficits or known brain injury – and the relationship between visual object processing and one of the most classical paradigms in cognitive psychology (Navon’s paradigm).