Thomas Palmeri named Centennial Professor
Dr. Thomas Palmeri, a Distinguished Professor in Psychology, has been named Centennial Professor. This honor, one of the highest at the university, highlights his groundbreaking contributions to the fields of visual categorization, category learning, and computational modeling. With over 570 yearly citations since 2013 his influence is broadly felt across psychology and neuroscience.
Palmeri leads the CATLAB and his research spans a wide range of topics, including the development of neural models for decision-making in speeded response tasks, the role of experience in shaping perceptual abilities, and the transition from rule-based to instance-based reasoning as expertise develops. His early models, RULEX and EBRW, have become foundational in the field.
Palmeri was a member of the Perceptual Expertise Network from 2001 to 2015, which developed a new model of collaboration and training to study the role of experience in visual object recognition and memory.
One of Palmeri’s significant recent contributions is a collaboration with Gordon Logan and Jeffrey Schall on a neurocomputational model called Salience by Competitive and Recurrent Interactions (SCRI). This model bridges neural spiking and computation in visual attention by explaining how neurons in the frontal eye field (FEF) accumulate salience evidence to guide eye movements. The explains the spiking activity of individual FEF visual neurons and accounts for the diversity of neural responses during visual decision-making tasks.
Palmeri has assumed the role of chair of the Psychology department in 2023.