Department of Psychology

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Research

Facial Animation

Facial animation is a research tool in the Speech Perception and Production Laboratory. Animation allows us to have experimental control of the dynamics of facial motion and motion cues are critical to the visual perception of speech and emotion. In recent years we have worked on three types of animation: 1. A physical model of the face that includes the biomechanics of the skin and the physiological characteristics of the facial musculature. 2. A kinematic facial animation system that is based on the principal components of facial deformation. 3. A kinematic facial animation system that is controlled by the action of facial regions that correspond to muscle lines of action.


Audiovisual Speech Perception

Our work on audiovisual speech perception focuses on three aspects of face-to-face communication. First, the mechanisms underlying cross-modal integration. Second, eye movement of perceivers during audiovisual speech perception. And finally, studies of the visual information for speech.

Speech Motor Control

The goal of our speech motor control work is to identify organizing principles underlying speech coordination. To this end we study the kinematics of lip, tongue, jaw and vocal fold movements and the muscle activity involve in producing these movements.