Jim Tanaka
Professor and Honours adviser
Psychology
- Contact:
- Office: COR A189 jtanaka@uvic.ca 250-721-7541
- Credentials:
- PhD (Oregon)
- Area of expertise:
- Cognition and brain sciences
- Related links:
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Interests
- cognitive and neural mechanisms of expertise
- face recognition and perception
- experimental techniques in vision research
- collaborative research on object and scene perception
Faculty bio
Jim Tanaka is a professor of psychology and a member of the Royal Society of Canada. Jim received his PhD from the University of Oregon and was a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on how experience shapes the way we see the world.
His research team investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms of real-world experts, such as birdwatchers, geologists and dermatologists. His team also studies the everyday “expertise” of face recognition examining the “other-race” effect, autism and face processing, and the perception of facial emotions.
His employs a variety of experimental techniques, including psychophysics, eye-tracking, EEG and machine learning. In 2020, Jim founded the , a group of international vision scientists who investigate object, face and scene perception.