James C Thompson

James C Thompson

James C Thompson

Professor

Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience: Examining how we recognize human movement and make sense of other peoples' actions and how this can be applied in specialized settings such as surveillance and in conditions in which human movement recognition may be impaired.

The ability to see how other people move is essential for many aspects of daily life – from things as simple as avoiding collisions to detecting suspicious behavior or recognizing someone else's emotions. The research efforts of the Perception & Action Neuroscience Group are focused on examining how we recognize human movement and make sense of other peoples' actions. We investigate these issues using a combination of behavioral paradigms, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and electroencephalography (EEG). The goal of the group’s research is to further the understanding of how we see and act with others as part of everyday life, in specialized settings such as surveillance, and in conditions in which human movement recognition may be impaired.

Selected Publications

Wheaton KJ, Thompson JC, Syngeniotis A, Abbott DF, Puce A. (2004) Viewing the motion of human body parts activates different regions of premotor, temporal, and parietal cortex. Neuroimage 22:277-88.

Thompson JC, Clarke M, Stewart T, Puce A. (2005) Configural processing of biological motion in human superior temporal sulcus. J Neurosci. 25:9059-66.

Dissertations Supervised

Vjosa Poshka, Contextual Effects in the Dictator Game (2022)

Wendy L. Baccus, The Role of Spatial Position on Gait Synchronization During Group Movement (2019)

Sarah Dziura, Temporal Dynamics of the Neural Representation of Identity and Social Connections (2018)

Ryan McKendrick, Non-linear Hemodynamics of Mental Workload and Workload Transitions (2016)

Christian Gonzalez, Individual Differences in Attention Control and Change Blindness (2015)