Ken Nakayama

Last updated
Ken Nakayama
Nationality American
Alma mater Haverford College
UCLA
Known for Prosopagnosia
Super recognisers
Awards Edgar D. Tillyer Award (2017)
Scientific career
Fields Vision science
Institutions Smith Kettlewell Eye Research Institute
Harvard University
Doctoral advisor Donald B. Lindsley
Doctoral students Peter Ulric Tse
Sara Mednick

Ken Nakayama is an American psychologist. Prior to retirement he was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He is now an emeritus professor at Harvard. [1]

Nakayama is known for his work on prosopagnosia (an inability to recognize faces) and super recognisers (people with significantly better-than-average face recognition ability). [2] [3] [4] A notable contribution is from his work on surface processing by the human visual system. [5] [6]

Nakayama received his BA from Haverford College and PhD from UCLA. From 1971 to 1990, he was at the Smith Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco. Since then, he has been at Harvard University. [7]

Nakayama helped in the formation and founding of the Vision Sciences Society and served as its first president. In 2016, the Society established the Ken Nakayama Medal for Excellence in Vision Science in honor of his numerous significant contributions. [8] In 2017, he received the Edgar D. Tillyer Award from The Optical Society. [9]

Related Research Articles

Optica is a professional society of individuals and companies with an interest in optics and photonics. It publishes journals, organizes conferences and exhibitions, and carries out charitable activities.

Horace Basil Barlow FRS was a British vision scientist.

George Sperling is an American cognitive psychologist, researcher, and educator. Sperling documented the existence of iconic memory. Through several experiments, he showed support for his hypothesis that human beings store a perfect image of the visual world for a brief moment, before it is discarded from memory. He was in the forefront in wanting to help the deaf population in terms of speech recognition. He argued that the telephone was created originally for the hearing impaired but it became popularized by the hearing community. He suggested with a sevenfold reduction in the bandwidth for video transmission, it can be useful for the improvement in American Sign Language communication. Sperling used a method of partial report to measure the time course of visual persistence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adelbert Ames Jr.</span> American scientist

Adelbert Ames Jr. was an American scientist who made contributions to physics, physiology, ophthalmology, psychology, and philosophy. He pioneered the study of physiological optics at Dartmouth College, serving as a research professor, then as director of research at the Dartmouth Eye Institute. He conducted important research into aspects of binocular vision, including cyclophoria and aniseikonia. Ames is perhaps best known for constructing illusions of visual perception, most notably the Ames room and the Ames window. He was a leading light in the Transactionalist School of psychology and also made contributions to social psychology.

Kenneth N. Ogle (1902-1968) was a scientist of human vision. He was born in Colorado, and attended the public school and college at Colorado Springs. In 1925, Ogle earned a bachelor's degree from Colorado College cum laude. After graduation from college and selection of physics as a career, Ogle spent two years at Dartmouth College, a year at the University of Minnesota, and then returned to Dartmouth College for his Ph.D. degree, awarded in 1930. He was later awarded an honorary medical degree by the University of Uppsala in Sweden.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brian Wandell</span> American visual neuroscientist

Brian A. Wandell is the Isaac and Madeline Stein Family Professor at Stanford University, where he is Director of the Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging, and Deputy Director of the Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute. He was a founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Vision Science.

Marie Gertrude Rand Ferree was an American research scientist who is known for her extensive body of work about color perception. Her work included "mapping the retina for its perceptional abilities", "developing new instruments and lamps for ophthalmologists", and "detection and measurement of color blindness". Rand, with LeGrand H. Hardy and M. Catherine Rittler, developed the HRR pseudoisochromatic color test.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gerald Westheimer</span>

Gerald Westheimer AM FRS is an Australian scientist at University of California, Berkeley researching the eye, its optics, and how we see details in space and in three dimensions.

Dorothea Jameson was an American cognitive psychologist who greatly contributed to the field of color and vision.

Professor John Dixon Mollon DSc FRS. is a British scientist. He is a leading researcher in visual neuroscience. His work has been cited over 15,000 times.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Russell L. De Valois</span>

Russell L. De Valois was an American scientist recognized for his pioneering research on spatial and color vision.

Leo Maurice Hurvich was an American psychologist who conducted research into human color vision. He was married to fellow cognitive psychologist Dorothea Jameson. The pair collaborated on much of their work, including an elaboration on the opponent process theory. Hurvich was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and he received the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology from the American Psychological Association.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pablo Artal</span> Spanish physicist and university teacher

Pablo Artal is a Spanish physicist and full professor specialized in optics at the University of Murcia, as well as in the development and application of new techniques in human vision research. He received the Spanish National Research award "Juan de la Cierva" and the Rey Jaime I Award for New Technologies in 2015. His main research topics are the optics of the eye and the retina and the development of optical and electronic imaging techniques in the field of biomedicine, ophtalmology and vision. He has contributed to the advance of methods for the study of the optics of the eye and contributed to the understanding of the factors that limit the resolution of the human vision. Moreover, his discoveries and ideas have been applied to instruments and devices used in the clinical practice of ophthalmology.

Edward Howard Adelson is an American neuroscientist who is currently the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Vision Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an Elected Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise L. Sloan</span> Vision scientist (1898-1982)

Louise Littig Sloan was an American ophthalmologist and vision scientist. She is credited for being a pioneer of the sub-division of clinical vision research, contributing more than 100 scientific articles in which she either authored or co-authored. Her most notable work was in the area of visual acuity testing where she developed and improved equipment. Sloan received her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in experimental psychology. She spent a short period of time in both Bryn Mawr's experimental psychology program as well as the Department of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School. The majority of her career, however, was spent at Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute where she directed the Wilmer Laboratory of Physiological Optics for 44 years. In 1971, Sloan was the second woman awarded the prestigious Edgar D. Tillyer Award by Optica (formerly Optical Society for her many achievements in the field of vision.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edgar Tillyer</span> Optical engineer

Edgar Derry Tillyer was an astronomer, computer and lens designer who was the director of research at the American Optical Company. The Optical Society established an award for distinction in the field of vision which is named in his honor, as he was the first award winner in 1954.

David Hoyt Brainard is an American psychologist who researches visual perception. He is the RRL Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, fellow of The Optical Society, Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, and the Association for Psychological Science, and co-editor of the Annual Review of Vision Science.

Glenn Ansel Fry was an American scientist who studied physiological optics and optometry.

Mary Myleen Hayhoe is an Australian American psychologist who researches vision. She has developed virtual environments for the investigation of visually guided behaviour. Hayhoe was awarded the 2022 Optica Award Edgar D. Tillyer Award for her contributions to visual perception and cognition.

Frank Tong is a cognitive neuroscientist and centennial professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University. He grew up in Toronto, Canada. Tong is recognized for his research on the neural bases of human visual perception, visual consciousness, attentional selection, face and object recognition, and visual working memory. In more recent work, he is developing deep neural network models of the human visual system.

References

  1. "Ken Nakayama". Harvard University, Department of Psychology. Harvard University. Retrieved 21 May 2024.
  2. Song, Sora (17 July 2006). "Do I Know You?". Time. Retrieved 7 March 2018.
  3. Goldberg, Carey (14 June 2006). "When faces have no name". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 7 March 2018.
  4. Keefe, Patrick Radden (15 August 2016). "The Detectives Who Never Forget a Face". The New Yorker. Retrieved 7 March 2018.
  5. "Ken Nakayama, OSA living history". OSA Living history. Retrieved August 6, 2021.
  6. "Visual surface representation: A critical link between lower-level and higher-level vision". scholar.google.de. Retrieved 2021-08-06.
  7. Nakayama, Ken (15 September 2021). "Coming of Age in Science: Just Look?". Annual Review of Vision Science. 7 (1): 1–17. doi: 10.1146/annurev-vision-100419-120946 . ISSN   2374-4642. PMID   34086479. S2CID   235347640 . Retrieved 26 January 2022.
  8. "The Ken Nakayama Medal for Excellence in Vision Science". Vision Sciences Society. Retrieved 7 March 2018.
  9. "Edgar D. Tillyer Award". The Optical Society. Retrieved 7 March 2018.