Bio
Research
Papers
Email
CV [pdf]

Bio

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Yale Department of Psychology, studying human cognition with behavioral and neuroimaging experiments. My research is devoted to two topics: visual perception and reward/decision-making. I work in the lab of Dr. Marvin Chun, and we frequently collaborate with Dr. Daeyeol Lee. Previously, I was a graduate student at Harvard University (Dr. Yuhong Jiang's Visual Cognition lab and the Harvard Vision Sciences Lab), and an undergraduate/research assistant at Vanderbilt University, working with Dr. Thomas Palmeri, Dr. Isabel Gauthier, and Dr. Randolph Blake.

Research

My research is devoted to two topics: reward/decision-making and visual perception, employing fMRI and behavior/psychophysics.

Decision-making and Reward

First, with Dr. Marvin Chun and in collaboration with Dr. Daeyeol Lee, I am investigating learning and memory in decision-making under uncertainty, in contexts in which each decision depends on prior choices and outcomes. We have recently contended that reinforcement and punishment signals are ubiquitously distributed throughout the brain (Vickery, Chun, & Lee, in press at Neuron). Second, with Dr. Chun, I conduct studies that ask whether associating rewards with images alters perception and visual representation.

Visual Perception

How does the visual system determine and represent the structure of the scene? What are the consequences of perceptual organization? This was the focus of my graduate thesis, in which I reported a novel form of perceptual grouping due to non-local cues ("induced grouping") and a novel form of grouping due to learned association ("associative grouping"). I have also investigated visual crowding (discovering an effect we termed "supercrowding"), as well as visual attention and spatial context learning. I continue to pursue elements of this research program at Yale in the lab of Dr. Marvin Chun; we have recently explored our discovery that objects distort spatial perception [PDF].

Papers

Published or in press:

Vickery, T.J., Chun, M.M., & Lee, D. (2011). Ubiquity and specificity of reinforcement signals throughout the human brain. Neuron, 72(1): 166-177. [LINK]

Bukach, C.M., Vickery, T.J., Kinka, D., & Gauthier, I. (in press). Training experts: Individuation without naming is worth it. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.

Vickery, T.J., Chun, M.M. (2010). Object-based warping: An illusory distortion of space within objects. Psychological Science, 21(12): 1759-1764. [PDF].

Vickery, T.J., Sussman, R.S., & Jiang, Y.V. (2010). Spatial context learning survives interference from working memory load. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 36(6): 1358-1371. [PDF].

Shim, W.M., Alvarez, G.A., Vickery, T.J., & Jiang, Y.V. (2010). The Number of Attentional Foci and Their Precision Are Dissociated in the Posterior Parietal Cortex. Cerebral Cortex. [PDF].

Vickery, T.J., & Jiang, Y.V. (2009). Associative grouping: Perceptual grouping of shapes by association. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 71 (4), pp. 896-909 [PDF]. *** This article was chosen by the editors for AP&P's "Best Article of 2009" award.

Vickery, T.J., Shim, W.M., Chakravarthi, R., Jiang, Y.V., & Luedeman, R. (2009). Supercrowding: Weakly masking a target expands the range of crowding. Journal of Vision. [PDF][LINK]

Vickery, T.J., & Jiang, Y.V. (2009). Inferior parietal lobule supports decision-making under uncertainty in humans. Cerebral Cortex, 19(4):916-925. [Link].

Vickery, T.J. (2008). Induced perceptual grouping. Psychological Science, 19(7): 693-701. [PDF]. [Demos coming soon].

Vickery, T.J., King, L.W. & Jiang, Y. (2005). Setting up the target template in visual search. Journal of Vision, 5(1):81-92. [PDF] [LINK]

Jiang, Y., Kuman, A., & Vickery, T.J. (2005). Integrating sequential arrays in visual short-term memory. Experimental Psychology, 52: 39-46. [PDF].