Michael J. Tarr is the Co-Director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as a Professor of Psychology. He studies the neural, cognitive, and computational mechanisms underlying visual perception and cognition. His research interests include object recognition, perceptual expertise, and, of late, multi-modal perception. In collaboration with his students Isabel Gauthier, Will Hayward, and Quoc Vuong, his lab has addressed two major issues:
- the neural and behavioral mechanisms that support invariant object recognition
- the roles of task, experience, and object category in the development of functional and neural specialization, in particular, establishing that perceptual expertise plays a critical role in the selectivity seen in putatively "face-specific" brain regions. Some of this work is notable for its use of Greebles.
Tarr joined the CMU faculty in 2009, prior to that he was a faculty member at Brown University from 1995-2009 and a faculty member at Yale University from 1989 to 1995. He received his Ph. D. in 1989 from MIT under the supervision of Steven Pinker. In 1997, he received the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in the area of cognition/human learning from the American Psychological Association and, in 2003, the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences.