Symposium: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Science of Face Perception

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Haxby and colleagues will hold a symposium that will bring together investigators who are working on models of face perception within different disciplines and provide a forum for them to interact through presentations, discussions, and informal interactions. The aim of this symposium is to facilitate interdisciplinary transfer of ideas and fostering collaborative research projects. The symposium will include speakers with backgrounds in cognitive and computational models of face perception, neuropsychology, non-human primate neurophysiology, functional neuroimaging, and social psychology. These researchers are working on inter-related problems concerning how faces are perceived and represented. All faculty participants are asked to bring a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow from their laboratories with them. These students and fellows will be asked to present posters at the symposium. The inclusion of these younger investigators is expected to enhance the impact of this symposium on future interdisciplinary collaborations. Proceedings of this meeting will be published on a web-site. The talks will be available as PowerPoint files with auditory and video recordings, and will include the discussion. By publishing the proceedings as a web-site with streaming media, the information will be disseminated much sooner than would be the case with a published volume. The talks will also then be available for instructional purposes to everyone. The invited participants include most of the investigators who have made the study of face perception a scientific endeavor. The symposium is both broad in terms of the number of disciplines that are represented, but is also focused on a specific domain of inquiry. Recent advances in computational models for artificial intelligence systems that can recognize face identity and interpret face action can potentially be integrated with functional neuroimaging and social cognitive investigations of face perception. Conversely, better understanding of how face perception is implemented in the human brain can provide new ideas that could be incorporated in a computational system. Better understanding of neural and computational systems may provide new insights for investigating social cognition and disorders of social cognition. Bringing investigators from various disciplines together in this symposium should provide a forum to transfer information among these disciplines and opportunities for establishing new collaborative relationships. This symposium will provide a multidisciplinary synthesis of state-of-the-art knowledge about computational and neural systems for representing and interpreting faces. Fostering new collaborative relationships will advance the field in all of the disciplines represented at the meeting. The inclusion of students and fellows will help to educate the next generation of investigators in this area. In addition, we will encourage graduate students at Princeton University who have an interest in face perception to attend the symposium and present posters on their research.