Dirk Bernhardt-Walther
100 St George St, Toronto, ON M5S 3G3
Campus: St. George
Having been trained as a physicist and computer scientist, Dirk Bernhardt-Walther earned a Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology in 2006, working with Christof Koch on modeling visual attention and object recognition. After a brief stint at York University in Toronto he became a Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There he worked with Diane Beck and Fei-Fei Li on natural scene perception and on decoding natural scene categories from fMRI data. From 2010 until 2014, Dr. Bernhardt-Walther was an Assistant Professor of Psychology and from 2012 until 2014 Associate Director of the Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences at The Ohio State University. In 2014, he moved to the University of Toronto, where he is now Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology. In his work Dirk aims to decipher the neural mechanisms that underlie the perception of complex real-world scenes. He also works on advancing methods for multivariate analysis of neuroimaging data.
Education
- PhD, California Institute of Technology
- M.Phil, University of Cambridge
- BA, University Leipzig
Research Interests
- Perception
- Cognition
- Cognitive Neuroscience
Publications
- Delaram Farzanfar and Dirk B. Walther (2023) Changing what you like: Modifying Contour Properties Shifts Aesthetic Valuations of Scenes, Psychological Science, in press.
- Elizabeth Y. Zhou, John Wilder, Claudia Damiano, and Dirk B. Walther (2023) Neural Dissociation Between Computational and Subjective Image Complexity, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. In press.
- Dirk B. Walther, Delaram Farzanfar, Seohee Han, and Morteza Rezanejad (2023) The Mid-Level Vision Toolbox for Computing Structural Properties of Real-World Images. Frontiers in Psychology, in press.
- Yaelan Jung, Tess Allegra Forest, Dirk B. Walther, Amy S. Finn (2023). Neither Enhanced Nor Lost: The Unique Role of Attention in Children's Neural Representations. Journal of Neuroscience, 43(21), 3849-3859. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0159-23.2023
- Claudia Damiano, Pinaki Gayen, Morteza Rezanejad, Archi Banerjee, Gobinda Banik, Priyadarshi Patnaik, Johan Wagemans, Dirk B. Walther (2023) Anger is red, sadness is blue: Emotion depictions in abstract visual art by artists and non-artists. Journal of Vision Vol. 23, 1. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.23.4.1
- Greer Gillies, Hyun Park, Jason Woo, Dirk B Walther, Jonathan S Cant, Keisuke Fukuda (2023) Tracing the emergence of the memorability benefit. Cognition 238, 105489. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105489
- Cameron Kyle-Davidson, Elizabeth Y. Zhou, Dirk B. Walther, Adrian G. Bors, Karla K. Evans (2023) Characterising and dissecting human perception of scene complexity. Cognition 231, 105319. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105319
- John Wilder, Morteza Rezanejad, Sven Dickinson, Kaleem Siddiqi, Allan Jepson, and Dirk B. Walther (2022) Neural correlates of local parallelism during naturalistic vision. PloS One 17 (1), e0260266. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260266
- Morteza Rezanejad, Mohammad Khodadad, Hamidreza Mahyar, Herve Lombaert, Michael Gruninger, Dirk B. Walther, Kaleem Siddiqi (2022) Medial spectral coordinates for 3D shape analysis. IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.