Research | Social Vision Lab

I am broadly interested in applying a vision science approach to social perception. Some of the topics that my research has focused on are gaze perception, face detection, biological motion perception, and clinical differences in sensory function.

Gaze Perception

Gaze cues (e.g., eye contact) are ubiquitous in our everyday social interactions, often helping us to understand other people’s intentions and predict their behaviour. This research explores the visual cues that underlie our perception of gaze direction, and sensory computations involved in extracting information about gaze direction from the appearance of the face and encoding that information across a neural population.

Sample papers

Palmer, CJ, Otsuka, Y, Clifford, CWG. (2020). A sparkle in the eye: Illumination cues and lightness constancy in the perception of eye contact. Cognition, 205, 104419.
Palmer, CJ, Bracken, SG, Otsuka, Y, Clifford, CWG. (2022). Is there a ‘zone of eye contact’ within the borders of the face? Cognition, 220, 104981.

Palmer, CJ, & Clifford, CWG. (2022). Spatial selectivity in adaptation to gaze direction. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 289, 20221230.

Face Detection

To enable social perception, our visual system must first be equipped to detect human faces and distinguish faces from other kinds of visual objects.
This research explores the perceptual mechanisms that enable face detection in human vision, and how these are adapted to the prevailing sensory environment.

Photo by Nan Fry, CC BY 2.0

Sample papers

Palmer, CJ, & Clifford, CWG. (2020). Face pareidolia recruits mechanisms for detecting human social attention. Psychological Science, 31(8), 1001-1012. Press: Why the brain is programmed to see faces in everyday objects
Palmer, CJ, Goddard, E, Clifford, CWG. (2022). Face detection from patterns of shading and shadows: the role of overhead illumination in generating the familiar appearance of the human face. Cognition, 225, 105172.
Han, S, Alais, D, Palmer, CJ. (2021). Dynamic face mask enhances continuous flash suppression. Cognition, 206, 104473.

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Biological Motion

Humans and other animals produce characteristic patterns of movement due to the physical constraints of our body and the unique ways that we interact with the environment (when compared to other things in the world that also move, but do not have a mind). This research explores how the human visual system detects and draws information from biological patterns of movement.

Sample papers

Palmer, CJ, Kim, P, Clifford, CWG. (2022). Gaze behaviour as a visual cue to animacy.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(2), 425–447.
Palmer, CJ, & Clifford, CWG. (2017). Perceived object trajectory is influenced by others' tracking movements.
Current Biology, 27, 2169–2176.
Chen, C, Boyce, WP, Palmer, CJ, & Clifford, CWG. (2023). Adaptation to walking direction in biological motion.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Clinical Research

People differ in their experience of social interactions, and these differences can become more profound in conditions like autism, schizophrenia, and face prosopagnosia. I have collaborated with clinical researchers in the UK, Belgium, Australia, and New Zealand to investigate whether systematic differences in how the sensory system processes information contribute to the characteristics of these conditions.

Sample papers

Little, Z, Palmer, CJ, Susilo, T. (2022). Normal gaze processing in developmental prosopagnosia. Cortex, 154, 46-61.
Palmer, CJ*, Lawson, RP*, Shankar, S, Clifford, CWG, & Rees, G. (2018). Autistic adults show preserved normalisation of sensory responses in gaze processing. Cortex, 103, 13–23. *Joint authorship.
Palmer, CJ, Lawson, RP, Hohwy, J. (2017). Bayesian approaches to autism: towards volatility, action, and behaviour. Psychological Bulletin, 143(5), 521–542.