academic

find my cv here

updated in Jan 2006

Address: 311 Wilson Hall, Department of Psychology
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN37203, USA
Email: alan.wong#vanderbilt.edu

My interest in research was sparked by my undergraduate advisor Prof. T.-C. Chan in Chinese University of Hong Kong. I started working in the field of object perception with my M. Phil.advisor William G. Hayward in CUHK (now in University of Hong Kong). Now I'm studying visual expertise in letter perception and subordinate-level object perception under the supervision of Isabel Gauthier and Thomas J. Palmeri. Really feel blessed to be working with them. And it's cool to be able to combine methods like psychophysics, fMRI, ERP, and computational modeling in research. The brain, with its own biases, is constantly bombarded and modified by our experience. The study of expertise in object perception not only applies to expertise training and rehabilitation, but also facilitates our understanding of the organization and potentials of our perceptual system. A big part of my research effort in the near future will be focused on recovering the general principles in perceptual learning and in the organization of our visual object perception system.

Research Interests

• Perceptual expertise with objects (e.g., faces, letters)
• Object recognition (e.g., viewpoint generalization, levels of abstraction)

Publications

• Wong, A.C.-N. & Gauthier (in press). An analysis of letter expertise in a levels-of-categorization framework. Visual Cognition.
• Gauthier, I., Wong, A. C.-N., Hayward, W.G., & Cheung, O. S. (2006). Font tuning associated with expertise in letter perception. Perception, 35(4), 541-559. [pdf]
• James, K. H., James, T. W., Jobard, G., Wong, A. C.-N. & Gauthier, I. (2005). Letter processing in the visual system: different patterns for single letters and strings. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 5, 452-466. [pdf]
• Wong, A. C.-N., Gauthier, I., Woroch, B., Debuse, C., & Curran, T. (2005). An early electrophysiological potential associated with expertise in letter perception. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 5, 306-318. [pdf]
• Hayward, W.G., Wong, A. C.-N., & Spehar, B. (2005). When are viewpoint costs greater for silhouettes than for shaded images? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 12, 321-327. [pdf]
• Wong, A. C.-N., & Hayward, W.G. (2005). Constraints on view combination: Effects of self-occlusion and difference between familiar views. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 31, 110-121. [pdf]
• Palmeri, T.J., Wong, A. C.-N., & Gauthier, I. (2004). Computational approaches to the development of perceptual expertise. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 378-386. [pdf]

Manuscripts Submitted / Under Review

• Wong, A. C.-N., Jobard, G., James, T. W., James, K. H. (submitted). Expertise with characters in alphabetic and non-alphabetic writing systems engage the same occipito-temporal area.