Dr. Gauthier received her doctoral degree from Yale in 1998, followed by concurrent post-doctoral fellowships at Yale and MIT, before taking a faculty position at Vanderbilt in 1999. She was named David K. Wilson Chair of Psychology in 2012, and is also Professor of Radiology and Radiological Sciences. Gauthier has received the Young Investigator Award, Cognitive Neuroscience Society in 2002, the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in the area of Behavioral/Cognitive Neuroscience in 2003 and the Troland research award from the National Academy of Sciences in 2008 “For seminal experiments on the role of visual expertise in the recognition of complex objects including faces and for exploration of brain areas activated by this recognition.” She has been a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science since 2010, Fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists since 2012, and Fellow of the Psychonomic Society since 2016. In 2000, she founded the Perceptual Expertise Network, linking over ten laboratories across North America in collaborations until 2017. Gauthier uses behavioral and neural methods to study many aspects of object and face recognition, with a focus on the role of perceptual expertise in category-specific effects in domains such as faces, letters or musical notation, with implications for disorders likes autism and congenital face blindness. Her recent work addresses domain-general visual abilities for object recognition and ensemble perception. She has published more than 150 peer-reviewed articles. Gauthier was an Associate Editor at JEP:HPP from 2005 to 2011, Editor of JEP:General from 2011 to 2017 and Editor of JEP:HPP since 2017.

Object Perception Lab
Faculty Profile