PSYC welcomes new lecturer Dr Tirta Susilo
The School of Psychology recently welcomed Dr Tirta Susilo, who has joined our cognitive neuroscience programme as a lecturer.
Recently the school welcomed new staff member Dr Tirta Susilo, who has taken up a lecturing position within our cognitive neuroscience programme. Originally from Jakarta, Tirta received his PhD from the Australian National University and completed postdoctoral training at Dartmouth College.
Tirta studies how we perceive and recognise objects, especially faces. He is interested in faces because they are the main carrier of visual information critical for social life, information such as identity, sex, age, race, emotion, and gaze. Tirta believes faces are a gate to understanding much of human behaviour, and so he considers studying face recognition a major task of psychology and neuroscience. A big part of Tirta’s research concerns prosopagnosia or faceblindness, namely the inability to recognise familiar faces despite otherwise normal vision and general cognition. Prosopagnosia acquired following brain damage is rare, but lifelong prosopagnosia due to failures to develop normal face processing is estimated to affect about 1 in 50 people. Tirta is currently investigating prosopagnosia to better understand the disorder as well as to gain insights about how face recognition is supposed to work.
Tirta is looking for motivated students at all levels who wish to undertake cognitive neuroscience research, particularly in face and object recognition. His laboratory uses the methods of psychophysics, individual differences, patient studies, eye tracking, and brain stimulation. He has several ongoing projects that require stimulus creation, test development, experimental design, data collection, or statistical analysis.
In 2016 Tirta will be teaching PSYC 331 (Perception) and PSYC 445 (Cognitive Neuroscience). He will also be teaching as part of PSYC 122 (Introduction to Psychology 2) and PSYC 231 (Cognitive Psychology).