Jim Tanaka

Jim Tanaka is a professor of psychology and a member of the Royal Society of Canada. Jim received his PhD from the University of Oregon and was a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on how experience shapes the way we see the world.

His research team investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms of real-world experts, such as birdwatchers, geologists and dermatologists. His team also studies the everyday “expertise” of face recognition examining the “other-race” effect, autism and face processing, and the perception of facial emotions.

His Different Minds Lab employs a variety of experimental techniques, including psychophysics, eye-tracking, EEG and machine learning. In 2020, Jim founded the Different Minds Collaborative, a group of international vision scientists who investigate object, face and scene perception.