Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences
(812) 856-0841
Rm 371 Psychology
thwjames@indiana.edu

See also: Perception and Neuroimaging (PAN) Lab

PhD, the University of Western Ontario; London, Ontario, Canada; 2001

My research is involved with discovering the neural mechanisms underlying human object recognition and representation. I use a combination of experimental techniques, including functional MRI and psychophysics to explore these questions. I see object representations as multi-sensory. In other words, object representations are sensory in nature, as opposed to being amodal constructs, and object representations are not uni-sensory (e.g., purely visual). Multi-sensory object representations are conceived as an ecological solution for various cognitive phenomena such as object perception and memory and the storage and retrieval of semantic knowledge.

The Perception and Neuroimaging (PAN) laboratory is housed within the Psychology Building. In addition to psychophysics testing rooms, we have access to the on-site 3T Siemens functional MRI facility. This allows the use of multiple techniques (i.e., behavior and neuroimaging) to address questions, which is one of the foundations of cognitive neuroscience.

James, T.W., & Blake, R. (2004). Perceiving object motion using vision and touch. Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience, 4, 201-207.

James, T.W., & Gauthier, I. (2003). Auditory and action semantic features activate sensory-specific perceptual brain regions. Current Biology, 13, 1792-1796.

James, T.W., Culham, J.C., Humphrey, G.K., Milner, A.D., & Goodale, M.A. (2003). Ventral occipital lesions impair object recognition but not object-directed grasping: A fMRI study. Brain,126, 2463-2475.

James, T.W., Humphrey, G.K., Gati, J.S., Menon, R.S., & Goodale, M.A. (2002). Differential effects of viewpoint on object-driven activation in dorsal and ventral streams. Neuron, 35, 793-801.

James, T.W., Humphrey, G.K., Gati, J.S., Servos, P., Menon, R.S., & Goodale, M.A. (2002). Haptic study of three-dimensional objects activates extrastriate visual areas. Neuropsychologia, 40, 1706-1714.

James, T.W., Humphrey, G.K., Gati, J.S., Menon, R.S., & Goodale, M.A. (2000). The effects of visual object priming on brain activation before and after recognition. Current Biology, 10, 1017-1024.