Frank Tong

Associate Professor of Psychology

Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience

Office: 531 Wilson
Phone: (615) 322-1780
Fax: (615) 343-8449
Email:

Degrees

Frank Tong studies the neural bases of visual perception, attention, awareness, recognition, and working memory, by using behavioral and human brain imaging techniques. He is especially interested in the problems of brain reading and mind reading, that is, whether measures of a person's brain activity can be used to readout a person's visual thoughts. The overall goal of this research is to understand how visual representations in different brain areas mediate people's ability to consciously perceive and recognize basic visual features and complex objects. Specific research topics include binocular rivalry, perceptual filling-in, feature representations in visual cortex, object recognition, face perception, mental imagery, visual attention and consciousness. His research is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Harrison, S., & Tong, F. (2009). Decoding reveals the contents of visual working memory in early visual areas. Nature, 458, 632-635.
Pearson, J., Clifford, C., & Tong, F. (2008). The functional impact of mental imagery on conscious perception. Current Biology, 18, 982-986.
Kamitani, Y, & Tong, F. (2006). Decoding seen and attended motion directions from activity in the human visual cortex. Current Biology, 16, 1096-1102.
Tong, F., Meng, M., & Blake, R. (2006). Neural bases of binocular rivalry. Trends in Cognitive Science, 10, 502-511.
Meng, M., Remus, D. R., & Tong, F. (2005). Filling-in of visual phantoms in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 1248-1254.
Kamitani, Y., Tong, F. (2005). Decoding the visual and subjective contents of the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 679-685.
Tong, F., & Engel, S. A. (2001). Interocular rivalry revealed in the human cortical blind-spot representation. Nature, 411, 195-199.
Tong, F., Nakayama, K., Vaughan, J.T., & Kanwisher, N. (1998). Binocular rivalry and visual awareness in human extrastriate cortex. Neuron, 21, 753-759.