Isabel Gauthier is outgoing editor of JEP: General and incoming editor at JEP: Human Perception and Performance. We are very happy that she has agreed to follow our invitation to Basel to give a PhD workshop (“Meet the Editor”) on the publishing process within psychology on Thursday, 23.3.

Beyond being a very successful editor, Isabel also does highly interesting research. On Thursday, 23.3. she will be giving a talk on her current research from 17:00-18:00. The talk will take place at Missionsstrasse 64a in room 00.008. Titel and abstract are listed below.

Title: Individual differences in object recognition

Speaker: Isabel Gauthier (Vanderbilt University)

Abstract: There is substantial evidence for individual differences in personality and cognitive abilities, but we lack clear intuitions about individual differences in visual abilities. Previous work on object recognition ability has typically compared performance with only two categories, each measured with only one task. This approach leads to results that are difficult to interpret and is thus insufficient for demonstration of domain-general effects. Furthermore, most previous work has used familiar object categories, for which experience may vary between participants and categories thereby reducing correlations that would stem from a common factor. Drawing from the literature on individual differences in other areas, the work I will present adopted a latent variable approach to test for the first time whether there is a domain-general Object Recognition Ability, o. Specifically, we assessed whether shared variance between latent factors representing performance for each of five novel object categories could be accounted for by a single higher-order factor. Our results showed that on average 89% of the shared variance between performance with novel object categories could be accounted for by a higher-order factor, providing strong evidence for o. Moreover, o also accounted for a moderate proportion of variance in tests of familiar object recognition. Together, these results provide the first demonstration of a reliable, domain-general Object Recognition Ability, and suggest a rich framework for future work in this area.