Farley Norman

Last updated
J. Farley Norman
Born
James Farley Norman

(1961-07-19)July 19, 1961
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater University of Texas at Austin
Vanderbilt University
SpouseHideko F. Norman
Scientific career
Fields Psychophysics
Perception
Experimental psychology
Thesis The perception of curved surfaces defined by optical motion
Website http://people.wku.edu/farley.norman/

Farley Norman is a professor of psychological sciences at Western Kentucky University. He is a co-director of the Gustav Fechner Perception Laboratory at Western Kentucky University, [1] along with his wife, Hideko Norman.

Contents

Education

Norman spent a majority of his undergraduate years studying engineering and mathematics, but ultimately earned his B.A. in psychology from the University of Texas at Austin (1983). He then completed his Master's (1989) and Ph.D. (1990) in experimental psychology from Vanderbilt University under the mentorship of Joseph S. Lappin. He later became a post-doctoral fellow at Brandeis University and Ohio State University, where he was further trained as a research scientist by James T. Todd.

Academic career

Norman began his professional academic career in 1996 at Western Kentucky University as a professor of psychology. He has taught a variety of courses, reflecting his interests in sensory and perceptual systems, psychopharmacology, history of psychology, and psychology and science fiction.

In addition to his role as professor, researcher, mentor, and advisor, Norman has served as the consulting editor of the journal Perception & Psychophysics .

Research

Norman's research has encompassed a variety of topics in human perception, particularly the perception of distance, spatial relationships (e.g., exocentric and egocentric distances), motion, and the 3-dimensional shape of environmental objects. His laboratory studies both the visual and haptic perception of 3-D object shape, combining computer programming and psychophysical methodologies to investigate how human observers perceive 3-D shape.

One of the hallmark features of Norman's research has been his exploration of the visual and haptic perception of ecologically valid objects (i.e., those that occur naturally in the real world). [2] [3] In particular, he has used a variety of stimuli recreated from bell peppers ( Capsicum annum ) in the form of plastic casts as well as laser-scanned, 3-D computer models available for 3-D printing. [4]

His research has also explored the effects of aging upon 3-D perception, with often encouraging results. Many of Norman's studies has demonstrated that older adults are able to effectively perceive many aspects of 3-D object shape well into their 70s and 80s (e.g., [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] ).

Norman has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals, as well as four book chapters (including chapters in Fechner's Legacy in Psychology [10] and Neural Networks for Vision and Image Processing [11] ).

Accomplishments

In 2005, Norman was awarded fellowship in the Association for Psychological Science (APS). [12] He was one of the first to be admitted to this association when it first began in 1988, and is one of the founding members. In addition, he is a past member of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Perception, Action & Cognition Grant Review Panel.

Norman has been recognized for his research and teaching many times throughout his tenure at Western Kentucky University. Among these accolades are a University Award for Faculty Excellence in Research/Creativity (2000), College Award for Faculty Excellence in Research/Creativity (College of Education and Behavioral Sciences, 2006; 2010), and College Award for Faculty Excellence in Teaching (College of Education and Behavioral Sciences, 2008). [13] Norman has been noted for his excellence in mentoring student research, having more than 170 student co-authorships on his published research articles. [1] He has also mentored two recipients of the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship. In 2018, one of his students, Lauren Pedersen was named as the only Goldwater Scholar in the state of Kentucky, and only of only 211 nationwide. [14] In 2019, his student Sydney Wheeler was also recognized. [15]

In 2011, he was named a University Distinguished Professor, the highest honor for Western Kentucky University faculty. [16]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Perception</span> Interpretation of sensory information

Perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system. Vision involves light striking the retina of the eye; smell is mediated by odor molecules; and hearing involves pressure waves.

A tactile illusion is an illusion that affects the sense of touch. Some tactile illusions require active touch, whereas others can be evoked passively. In recent years, a growing interest among perceptual researchers has led to the discovery of new tactile illusions and to the celebration of tactile illusions in the popular science press. Some tactile illusions are analogous to visual and auditory illusions, suggesting that these sensory systems may process information in similar ways; other tactile illusions don't have obvious visual or auditory analogs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Binocular vision</span> Type of vision with two eyes facing the same direction

In biology, binocular vision is a type of vision in which an animal has two eyes capable of facing the same direction to perceive a single three-dimensional image of its surroundings. Binocular vision does not typically refer to vision where an animal has eyes on opposite sides of its head and shares no field of view between them, like in some animals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gustav Fechner</span> German experimental psychologist, physicist, and philosopher (1801–1887)

Gustav Theodor Fechner was a German physicist, philosopher, and experimental psychologist. A pioneer in experimental psychology and founder of psychophysics, he inspired many 20th-century scientists and philosophers. He is also credited with demonstrating the non-linear relationship between psychological sensation and the physical intensity of a stimulus via the formula: , which became known as the Weber–Fechner law.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Weber–Fechner law</span> Related laws in the field of psychophysics

The Weber–Fechner laws are two related hypotheses in the field of psychophysics, known as Weber's law and Fechner's law. Both laws relate to human perception, more specifically the relation between the actual change in a physical stimulus and the perceived change. This includes stimuli to all senses: vision, hearing, taste, touch, and smell.

Psychophysics quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they produce. Psychophysics has been described as "the scientific study of the relation between stimulus and sensation" or, more completely, as "the analysis of perceptual processes by studying the effect on a subject's experience or behaviour of systematically varying the properties of a stimulus along one or more physical dimensions".

In psychophysics, sensory threshold is the weakest stimulus that an organism can sense. Unless otherwise indicated, it is usually defined as the weakest stimulus that can be detected half the time, for example, as indicated by a point on a probability curve. Methods have been developed to measure thresholds in any of the senses.

Visual search is a type of perceptual task requiring attention that typically involves an active scan of the visual environment for a particular object or feature among other objects or features. Visual search can take place with or without eye movements. The ability to consciously locate an object or target amongst a complex array of stimuli has been extensively studied over the past 40 years. Practical examples of using visual search can be seen in everyday life, such as when one is picking out a product on a supermarket shelf, when animals are searching for food among piles of leaves, when trying to find a friend in a large crowd of people, or simply when playing visual search games such as Where's Wally?

Haptic perception means literally the ability "to grasp something". Perception in this case is achieved through the active exploration of surfaces and objects by a moving subject, as opposed to passive contact by a static subject during tactile perception.

Roberta "Bobby Lou" Klatzky is a Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). She specializes in human perception and cognition, particularly relating to visual and non-visual perception and representation of space and geometric shapes. Klatzky received a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1968 and a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1972. She has done extensive research on human haptic and visual object recognition, navigation under visual and nonvisual guidance, and perceptually guided action.

Visual perception is the ability to interpret the surrounding environment through photopic vision, color vision, scotopic vision, and mesopic vision, using light in the visible spectrum reflected by objects in the environment. This is different from visual acuity, which refers to how clearly a person sees. A person can have problems with visual perceptual processing even if they have 20/20 vision.

Haptic memory is the form of sensory memory specific to touch stimuli. Haptic memory is used regularly when assessing the necessary forces for gripping and interacting with familiar objects. It may also influence one's interactions with novel objects of an apparently similar size and density. Similar to visual iconic memory, traces of haptically acquired information are short lived and prone to decay after approximately two seconds. Haptic memory is best for stimuli applied to areas of the skin that are more sensitive to touch. Haptics involves at least two subsystems; cutaneous, or everything skin related, and kinesthetic, or joint angle and the relative location of body. Haptics generally involves active, manual examination and is quite capable of processing physical traits of objects and surfaces.

Philip Kellman is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and the current Cognitive Area Chair in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also Adjunct Professor of Surgery in the David Geffen UCLA School of Medicine, and the founder of Insight Learning Technology, Inc, a company that applies perceptual learning, adaptive learning technology, and principles from cognitive science research to improve education and training. His research interests involve perception and visual cognition, specifically visual perception of objects, shape, space, and motion, and perceptual development. He is also an expert in perceptual learning, adaptive learning, and their applications to skill acquisition and educational technology.

Michael Werner von Grünau was a Canadian psychologist and neurophysiologist at Concordia University.

Object-based attention refers to the relationship between an ‘object’ representation and a person’s visually stimulated, selective attention, as opposed to a relationship involving either a spatial or a feature representation; although these types of selective attention are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Research into object-based attention suggests that attention improves the quality of the sensory representation of a selected object, and results in the enhanced processing of that object’s features.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Melvyn A. Goodale</span>

Melvyn Alan Goodale FRSC, FRS is a Canadian neuroscientist. He was the founding Director of the Brain and Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Visual Neuroscience. He holds appointments in the Departments of Psychology, Physiology & Pharmacology, and Ophthalmology at Western. Goodale's research focuses on the neural substrates of visual perception and visuomotor control.

Ensemble coding, also known as ensemble perception or summary representation, is a theory in cognitive neuroscience about the internal representation of groups of objects in the human mind. Ensemble coding proposes that such information is recorded via summary statistics, particularly the average or variance. Experimental evidence tends to support the theory for low-level visual information, such as shapes and sizes, as well as some high-level features such as face gender. Nonetheless, it remains unclear the extent to which ensemble coding applies to high-level or non-visual stimuli, and the theory remains the subject of active research.

Susan J. Lederman is a Canadian experimental psychologist. She is a professor emerita in the Department of Psychology at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She is recognized for her contributions to the field of haptics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Herzog (neuroscientist)</span> German neuroscientist

Michael Herzog is a German neuroscientist and psychophysicist. His interdisciplinary research draws on biology, neurosciences, mathematics, and philosophy with a focus on perception. Herzog is a professor for neuroscience at the School of Life Sciences at EPFL and head of the Laboratory of Psychophysics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roland William Fleming</span> Anglo-German psychologist

Roland William Fleming, FRSB is a British and German interdisciplinary researcher specializing in the visual perception of objects and materials. He is the Kurt Koffka Professor of Experimental Psychology at Justus Liebig University of Giessen. and the Executive Director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior of the Universities of Marburg and Giessen. He is also co-Spokesperson for the Research Cluster “The Adaptive Mind”.

References

  1. 1 2 "J. Farley Norman - Vision and Haptics Lab | Western Kentucky University". www.wku.edu. Retrieved 2018-04-05.
  2. ↑ Norman, J. Farley; Norman, Hideko F.; Clayton, Anna Marie; Lianekhammy, Joann; Zielke, Gina (2004). "The visual and haptic perception of natural object shape". Perception & Psychophysics. 66 (2): 342–351. doi: 10.3758/BF03194883 . PMID   15129753. S2CID   26749319.
  3. ↑ Norman, J. Farley; Phillips, Flip; Holmin, Jessica S.; Norman, Hideko F.; Beers, Amanda M.; Boswell, Alexandria M.; Cheeseman, Jacob R.; Stethen, Angela G.; Ronning, Cecilia (2012). "Solid shape discrimination from vision and haptics: Natural objects (Capsicum annuum) and Gibson's "feelies"". Experimental Brain Research. 222 (3): 321–332. doi:10.1007/s00221-012-3220-7. PMID   22918607. S2CID   253739333.
  4. ↑ "Bell Peppers". Flip Phillips. 2016-09-27. Retrieved 2018-04-12.
  5. ↑ Norman, J. Farley; Adkins, Olivia C.; Dowell, Catherine J.; Shain, Lindsey M.; Hoyng, Stevie C.; Kinnard, Jonathan D. (2017). "The visual perception of distance ratios outdoors". Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. 79 (4): 1195–1203. doi: 10.3758/s13414-017-1294-9 . PMID   28197837. S2CID   256210958.
  6. ↑ Norman, J. Farley; Adkins, Olivia C.; Norman, Hideko F.; Cox, Andrea G.; Rogers, Connor E. (2015). "Aging and the visual perception of exocentric distance". Vision Research. 109 (Pt A): 52–58. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2015.02.007 . PMID   25720533. S2CID   9490959.
  7. ↑ Norman, J. Farley; Cheeseman, Jacob R.; Adkins, Olivia C.; Cox, Andrea G.; Rogers, Connor E.; Dowell, Catherine J.; Baxter, Michael W.; Norman, Hideko F.; Reyes, Cecia M. (2015). "Aging and solid shape recognition: Vision and haptics". Vision Research. 115 (Pt A): 113–118. doi:10.1016/j.visres.2015.09.001. PMID   26342965. S2CID   14063844.
  8. ↑ Norman, J. Farley; Adkins, Olivia C.; Pedersen, Lauren E.; Reyes, Cecia M.; Wulff, Rachel A.; Tungate, Alex (2015). "The visual perception of exocentric distance in outdoor settings". Vision Research. 117: 100–104. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2015.10.003 . PMID   26475085. S2CID   19993287.
  9. ↑ Norman, J. Farley; Kappers, Astrid M. L.; Cheeseman, Jacob R.; Ronning, Cecilia; Thomason, Kelsey E.; Baxter, Michael W.; Calloway, Autum B.; Lamirande, Davora N. (2013). "Aging and Curvature Discrimination from Static and Dynamic Touch". PLOS ONE. 8 (7): e68577. Bibcode:2013PLoSO...868577N. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0068577 . PMC   3699499 . PMID   23844224.
  10. ↑ Solomon, Joshua A. (2011). Fechner's Legacy in Psychology: 150 Years of Elementary Psychophysics. Brill Academic Pub. ISBN   978-9004192201.
  11. ↑ Carpenter, G. A. & Grossberg, S. (1992). Neural Networks for Vision and Image Processing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  12. ↑ "Association for Psychological Science: APS Fellows". www.psychologicalscience.org. Archived from the original on 2020-08-13. Retrieved 2018-04-05.
  13. ↑ "President's Convocation - August 24, 2012 | Western Kentucky University". www.wku.edu. Retrieved 2018-07-31.
  14. ↑ "WKU student selected as 2018 Goldwater Scholar". Media Relations. Retrieved 2018-07-31.
  15. ↑ "2019 Goldwater Scholars by Institution State | Barry Goldwater". goldwater.scholarsapply.org. 3 June 2016. Retrieved 2019-04-26.
  16. ↑ "Psychology faculty member Norman adds Distinguished Professor to honors". WKU News Blog. 2011-08-17. Retrieved 2018-04-07.
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