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Postdoctoral Fellow

ARC DECRA Fellowship, 2019–2021

Postdoctoral Researcher,ÌýºÚÁÏÍø´óʼÇ, 2016–2019

Ph.D., Monash University, 2016

Bachelor of Behavioural Neuroscience (Honours), Monash University, 2009

Contact:Ìý³¦´Ç±ô¾±²Ô.±è²¹±ô³¾±ð°ù°ª³Ü²Ô²õ·É.±ð»å³Ü.²¹³Ü

Research Summary

I study visual perception, with a focus on how the brain processes the social features of our sensory environment, like the eyes, faces, and behaviours of the people around us. I study this using visual psychophysics together with methods that include computational modelling and 3D graphical rendering. An aim of this research is to build upon our knowledge of how the visual system extracts the most basic elements of our environment (e.g., colour, shape, and motion) and develop a similarly mechanistic understanding of how our experience of the social world arises from the activity of our nervous system.

I am funded by the Australian Research Council, working on a project that seeks to understand the perceptual and neural mechanisms that underlie our sensitivity to dynamic cues to social attention (e.g., eye and head movements). I lead another ARC project together with Professor Colin Clifford, which focusses on the detection of animacy in human vision, such as the question of what characterises 'lifelike' or ‘humanlike’ patterns of motion. A clinical application of this research is to understand how systematic differences in the way that the brain deals with sensory information contribute to both sensory and social difficulties in conditions like autism and schizophrenia, which I pursue together with collaborators in the UK and Australia.

Previously, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher inÌý,Ìýfocussing on the neural and sensory mechanisms underlying our perception of other people’s gaze direction. I completed an interdisciplinary Ph.D. at theÌýÌýat Monash University, supervised by ProfessorsÌýÌý²¹²Ô»åÌý. My doctoral research concerned how general neurocognitive models of sensory processing in the brain (e.g., Bayesian and predictive coding models) shed light on the differences in sensory integration and social cognition that can occur in autism.

Research Areas:Ìýsocial vision, sensory processing,Ìýface perception,Ìýcomputational psychiatry, autism.

Teaching:

Ìý(2019â€Ëð°ù±ð²õ±ð²Ô³Ù)Ìý

Available to supervise research students.

Journal Articles:

Palmer, CJ, Bracken, SG, Otsuka, Y, Clifford, CWG. (2022). Cognition, 220, 104981.

Han, S, Alais, D, Palmer, CJ. (2021). . Cognition, 206, 104473. Ìý

Palmer, CJ, Otsuka, Y, Clifford, CWG. (2020). . Cognition, 205, 104419.
Ìý
Deschrijver, E., & Palmer, CJ. (2020). Reframing social cognition: . Psychological Bulletin, 146(11), 941-969. Ìý

Palmer, CJ, & Clifford, CWG. (2020). Face pareidolia recruits mechanisms for detecting human social attention. Psychological Science, 31(8), 1001-1012.

Palmer, CJ*, Caruana, N*, Clifford, CWG, Seymour, K. (2018).Ìý.ÌýRoyal Society Open Science. *Joint authorship.

Palmer, CJ*, Caruana, N*, Clifford, CWG, Seymour, K. (2018).Ìý.ÌýRoyal Society Open Science. *Joint authorship.

Clifford, CWG, & Palmer, CJ. (2018).Ìý.ÌýFrontiers in Psychology, 9:2165.

Palmer, CJ, Lawson, RP, Clifford, CWG, & Ree