Neural bases of human visual perception and cognition

Frank Tong
Department of Psychology
531 Wilson Hall
615-322-1780 (office)

Frank Tong studies the neural bases of visual perception, recognition, attention, awareness and working memory, by using behavioral and human neuroimaging techniques.  He is especially interested in the problems of brain reading and mind reading, that is, whether measures of a person’s brain activity can be used to readout a person’s visual thoughts. The overall goal of this research is to understand how visual representations in different brain areas mediate people’s abiity to consciously perceive and recognize basic visual features and complex objects.

PUBLICATIONS:

• Kamitani, Y., Tong, F. (2005). Decoding the visual and subjective contents of the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 679-685.

• Pearson, J., Clifford, C., & Tong, F. (2008). The functional impact of mental imagery on conscious perception. Current Biology, 18, 982-986.

• Harrison, S. A., & Tong, F. (2009). Decoding reveals the contents of visual working memory in early visual areas. Nature, 458, 632-635.