Professor of Psychology
co-Director of Scientific Computing

I earned my BS in Cognitive Science from Carnegie Mellon and my PhD in Psychology from Indiana University. At Vanderbilt, I am currently Professor of Psychology, co-Direct the program in Scientific Computing, and Direct the Computer Services module of the VVRC. My laboratory studies visual cognition, including visual categorization, visual memory, and visual decision making. We study how objects are perceived and represented by the visual system, how visual knowledge is represented and learned, and how visual decisions are made. We approach these questions using a combination of behavioral experiments, cognitive neuroscience techniques, and computational and neural modeling. One line of work,  investigates the temporal dynamics of visual object categorization and perceptual expertise for objects and faces. Another line of work, uses computational modeling of visual decision making to predict behavioral dynamics and neural dynamics.

Lab Website
Email: thomas.j.palmeri@vanderbilt.edu