Associate Professor of Psychology

Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience

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

Personal Website

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Degrees

• Ph.D., Harvard University, 1999

Research Area

• Frank Tong studies the neural bases of visual perception, recognition, attention and awareness 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.

Representative Publications

• Tong, F., Nakayama, K., Vaughan, J.T., & Kanwisher, N. (1998). Binocular rivalry and visual awareness in human extrastriate cortex. Neuron, 21, 753-759
• Tong, F., & Nakayama, K. (1999). Robust representations for faces: Evidence from visual search. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 25, 1016-1035.
• Tong, F., Nakayama, K., Moscovitch, M., Weinrib, O., & Kanwisher, N. (2000) Response properties of the human fusiform face area. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 17, 257-279
• Cohen, J. D., & Tong, F. (2001). The Face of Controversy. Science, 293, 2405- 2407
• Tong, F., & Engel, S. A. (2001). Interocular rivalry revealed in the human cortical blind-spot representation. Nature, 411, 195-199
• Tong, F., (2003). Primary visual cortex and visual awareness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4, 219-229
• Meng, M., Tong F. (2004). Can attention selectively bias bistable perception? Differences between binocular rivalry and ambiguous figures. Journal of Vision, 4, 539-551.
• Kamitani, Y., Tong, F. (2005). Decoding the visual and subjective contents of the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 679-685.
• Meng, M., Remus, D. R., & Tong, F. (2005). Filling-in of visual phantoms in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 1248-1254.
• Awater, H., Kerlin, J. K., Evans, K. K., & Tong, F. (2005). Cortical representation of space around the blind spot. Journal of Neurophysiology, 94, 3314-3324.
• McKeeff, T.J., Tong, F. (in press). The timing of perceptual decisions for ambiguous face stimuli in the human ventral visual cortex. Cerebral Cortex.
• Kamitani, Y. & Tong, F. (2006). Decoding seen and attended motion directions from activity in the human visual cortex. Current Biology, 16, 1096-1102.