{"id":11,"date":"2018-04-18T20:51:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-18T20:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca\/myportfolio\/?page_id=11"},"modified":"2025-09-13T20:57:32","modified_gmt":"2025-09-14T03:57:32","slug":"home","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca\/differentmindslab\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Lab"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Different Minds Lab is a research group organized by Dr. Jim Tanaka<\/a>, a cognitive psychologist and Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Victoria<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The scientific mission of the lab is to understand the cognitive processes and temporal dynamics of expert face and object recognition. In normal adults, everyday experience leads to an “expertise” for faces that enables us to recognize a familiar face or emotional expression in a split second without conscious thought. In some individuals, such as birdwatchers and dermatologists, extensive experience in a specialized interest also leads to expert recognition for these objects-of-expertise. Understanding the nature of holistic processing, a cognitive mechanism that is fundamental to face perception and memory, and the visual learning mechanisms that operate along the “path to expertise” is central to our research goals.<\/p>\n

In the past few years, we have worked to transform our lab to primarily conduct web-based experimentation<\/a>. Beyond learning existing tools, we have focused on developing new methods to push the boundaries of this field. Our main project has been Gazer- an extension of jsPsych that allows us to collect eye-tracking data using the video feeds from participant’s laptops.<\/p>\n

As of 2023, we have shifted our primary focus in the lab to a new data modelling software, PsiZ<\/a>, created by Dr. Brett Roads<\/a>. So far, we have examined how PsiZ can track the development of perceptual expertise. PsiZ renders powerful visualizations that depict our participants’ perceived categorical structure of stimulus set items. Using PsiZ, we often survey experts and novices in various visually-based domains (e.g., warblers, rocks, NBA basketball, and Other-Race faces) to examine how one’s perception shifts with varying levels of expertise. We are also currently testing the limits of PsiZ by exploring how it may be used to assess individual differences in visual perception.<\/p>\n

Members of the Different Minds Lab frequently collaborate with researchers from other institutions and labs. To support cross-lab collaborations, Dr. Jim Tanaka founded the Different Minds Collaborative<\/a> (DMC), an interdisciplinary research collaborative that meets monthly to discuss ongoing research in vision sciences. These monthly discussions frequently spark cross-lab collaborations that have, in turn, fostered a strong sense of community within the DMC.<\/p>\n

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From left to right:  (Top row), Jonathan Kiss, Nick Argument, Anna Lawrance, Lucas Copp, Eric Mah, Bennett King-Nyberg,    (Middle row), Tove Jensen, Grace Veugelers, Keeli Smith, Jim Tanaka, Yueling Sun, Daniela Orellana Gonzalez,    (Bottom row), Abby Hunter, Sarah Albassam, Alice Zaric, Isabel Davies-Stevenson, Nastaran Khodaeian.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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