Isabel Gauthier, David K. Wilson Chair of Psychology, Vice Chair Department of Psychology, Professor of Radiology and Radiological Sciences
Object Perception Laboratory (OPLab)
Isabel Gauthier heads the Object Perception Laboratory (OPLab) in the Vanderbilt Psychology Department. She began her career using behavioral and cognitive neuroscience approaches to test the perceptual expertise account of face-recognition specialization, demonstrating how training with novel “greeble” objects can recruit the same neural machinery as faces, and result in several of the same behavioral signatures. In 2001, she launched the Perceptual Expertise Network (first supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and later by NSF)—to foster collaboration across several labs using different methods to study how experience shapes object processing. That work eventually led her to ask: when we train people to acquire expertise in the laboratory, why do some people learn faster than others and achieve better performance? Since 2012, the OPLab has studied such individual differences, which have classically been ignored in high-level vision. They use latent-variable methods (borrowed from clinical, personality, and intelligence research) to extract a domain-general object-recognition factor (o, for object recognition) that predicts performance across diverse tasks and categories. Recent studies investigate how this general ability interacts with category-specific experience—whether in reading musical notation, identifying prepared foods, or making expert medical diagnoses—to shape real-world perceptual decisions. By combining neuroimaging, psychophysics, and large-scale individual-differences analyses, the lab seeks a unified account of how general abilities and acquired expertise together determine our visual world.
At the 2025 meeting of the Vision Sciences Society, Melina Mueller presented a poster on the link between affective responses to food, and the role of color on food recognition. Red-green and blue-yellow filters amplify the negative correlation between food neophobia and food recognition accuracy, and food disgust particularly impairs food recognition when red-green information is absent. Conor Smithson gave a talk on research with structural equation modeling that reveals how object recognition comprises separable perception and memory subfactors loading onto a higher-order general ability o, with low-level vision and working memory uniquely predicting each subfactor, and general intelligence contributing to both. After controlling for all the covariates, a significant amount of variance in perception and memory indicators of object recognition is uniquely explained by o. The lab also relates brain structure to perceptual abilities, as in Rankin McGugin’s recent work studying the way in which car and face recognition relate to the thickness of different layers in the fusiform face-selective area, and how the pattern differs in adults with Autism.