I am broadly interested in the cognitive mechanisms involved in visual object recognition, memory, and categorization and how these processes are modulated by experience and expertise. A good deal of my research with my advisors Isabel Gauthier of the OPL and Tom Palmeri of the CatLab has used faces, a category for which we are all experts, to explore a behavioral marker of perceptual expertise, holistic processing. My dissertation at Vanderbilt explored the consequences of naming objects on memory for those objects.
Representative Publications
Richler, J.J., Mack, M.L., Gauthier, I., & Palmeri, T.J. (2009) Holistic processing of faces happens at a glance. Vision Research, 49, 2856-2861.
Richler, J.J., Cheung, O.S., Wong, A.C.-N., & Gauthier, I. (2009). Does response interference contribute to face composite effects? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16, 258-263.
Richler, J.J., Bukach, C.M., & Gauthier, I. (2009). Context influences holistic processing of non-face objects in the composite task. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 71, 530-540
Cheung, O.S., Richler, J.J., Palmeri, T.J. & Gauthier, I. (2008). Revisiting the role of spatial frequencies in the holistic processing of faces. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 34, 1327-1336.
Richler, J.J., Tanaka, J.W., Brown, D.D. & Gauthier, I. (2008). Why does selective attention to parts fail in face processing? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 34, 1356-1368.
Richler, J.J., Gauthier, I., Wenger, M.J. & Palmeri, T.J. (2008). Holistic processing of faces: Perceptual and decisional components. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 34, 328-342.
Richler, J.J., Mack, M.L., Gauthier, I. & Palmeri, T.J. (2007). Distinguishing between perceptual and decisional sources of holism in face processing. Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 1427-1432.