Professor
Ph.D., Brown University, 1988
Visual Perception, Quantitative Models

Email: otoole@utdallas.edu
Phone: 972-883-2486
Office: GR 4.214

Visit personal webpage
Face Perception Research Laboratory

Professional Narrative

My research interests include human perception, memory, and cognition, with an emphasis on computational approaches to modeling human information processing. I received a B.A. in Psychology (1983) from The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, and a M.S. (1985) and Ph.D. (1988) in Experimental Psychology from Brown University, Providence, RI. Subsequently, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France, supported by the French Embassy to the United States, and at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Télécommunications, Paris, France. In 1989, I came to the University of Texas at Dallas, where I established a laboratory for visual perception and image/object recognition experiments. In 1994-1996 I participated in two 6 month sabbaticals at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. There, I worked on a variety of projects aimed at modeling the perceptual information in three-dimensional laser scans of human heads and relating this information to human memory for faces. I have continued this collaboration and have also continued on work at UTD on human memory for faces, and computational models of visual perception. I am currently working on two projects. The first is aimed at understanding how we recognize people from multiple, dynamic, biometric cues to identity. The second involves computational modeling of data from functional neuroimaging experiments.

Research Interests

My research interests include perception, memory, and cognition, with special interests in recognition memory for faces. Recent work in my lab is aimed at understanding how we recognize people, both from moving and static displays. We have also developed and tested computational models of face recognition and have tried to link the performance of these models to the characteristics of human performance on similar tasks. Combined, the human memory and computational studies are useful for developing theoretical ideas about how the brain represents the highly complex visual information in human faces.

Recent Publications

O’Toole, A. J., Jiang, F., Abdi, H., Penard, N., Dunlop, J. P. & Parent, M. A. (in press, 2007). Theoretical, statistical, and practical perspectives on pattern-based classification approaches to functional neuroimaging analysis. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 1735-1752.

O’Toole, A. J., Phillips, P. J., Jiang, F., Ayyad, J., Pénard, N., & Abdi, H. (2007). Face recognition algorithms surpass humans matching faces across changes in illumination. IEEE: Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 29(9), 1642-1646. Supplemental Material.

Jiang, F., Blanz, V. & O’Toole, A. J. (2006). Probing the visual representation of faces with adaptation: A view from the other side of the mean. Psychological Science, 17, 493-500.

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