Palmer, Colin

Palmer, Colin

Colin Palmer

Assistant Professor

Ph.D. (Monash), B.BNSc. (Hons.) (Monash)

When interacting with others, we effortlessly ‘read’ information in their appearance and behaviour, such as their identity, their emotional state, and their focus of attention. How does our brain extract and encode this information? I approach this question using visual psychophysics, computational modelling and 3D-graphical rendering, seeking 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 sensory processes. A clinical application of this research is to understand how systematic differences in the way that the brain processes sensory information may contribute to sensory and social difficulties in conditions like autism, schizophrenia and face prosopagnosia.

TEL: (65) 6601 6951
EMAIL: c.palmer@nus.edu.sg
ROOM: AS4-02-11
WEBPAGE: Palmer, Colin
Social Vision Lab

Research Interests:

  • Visual perception
  • Face perception, gaze perception, and biological motion
  • Sensory coding
  • Social cognition
  • Autism, schizophrenia, face prosopagnosia

Recent/Representative Publications:

Palmer, CJ, & Clifford, CWG. (2020). Face pareidolia recruits mechanisms for detecting human social attention. Psychological Science, 31(8), 1001-1012. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620924814

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. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104419

Palmer, CJ, Kim, P, Clifford, CWG. (2022). Gaze behaviour as a visual cue to animacy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fxge0001281