Frank Tong is a cognitive neuroscientist and centennial professor of psychology at

Vanderbilt University Vanderbilt University (informally Vandy or VU) is a private university, private research university in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1873, it was named in honor of shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provide ...

. He grew up in

Toronto, Canada Toronto ( , locally pronounced or ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, most populous city in Canada. It is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Ontario. With a p ...

. Tong is recognized for his research on the neural bases of human visual perception, visual consciousness, attentional selection, face and object recognition, and visual working memory. In more recent work, he is developing deep neural network models of the human visual system.

Education

Tong received his B.S. in Psychology at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada in 1995, where he worked with Barrie Frost. Tong completed his Ph.D. at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

in 1999 working with Ken Nakayama and

Nancy Kanwisher Nancy Gail Kanwisher FBA (born 1958) is the Walter A Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a researcher at the McGovern Institute for B ...

. He completed one year of postdoctoral research with Steve Engel at the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...

before beginning his first faculty position as an assistant professor at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

(2000-2004). He moved to Vanderbilt University in 2004 to continue his pursuits of fMRI research, where he is now a Centennial Professor of Psychology.

Awards and recognition

Tong has received the

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Pri ...

50 Award (2005), Young Investigator Awards from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (2006) and the

Vision Sciences Society Vision, Visions, or The Vision may refer to: Perception Optical perception * Visual perception, the sense of sight * Visual system, the physical mechanism of eyesight * Computer vision, a field dealing with how computers can be made to gain und ...

(2009), and the Troland Research Award from the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

"for pioneering the use of

neural decoding Neural decoding is a neuroscience field concerned with the hypothetical reconstruction of sensory and other stimuli from information that has already been encoded and represented in the brain by biological neural network, networks of neurons. Recon ...

techniques to explore mechanisms in the human brain mediating perception, attention, and object recognition."

Representative Publications

Tong, F., Nakayama, K., Vaughan, J. T., & Kanwisher, N. (1998)
Binocular rivalry and visual awareness in human extrastriate cortex. Neuron, 21, 753-759.
Tong, F., & Engel, S. A. (2001)
Interocular rivalry revealed in the human cortical blind-spot representation. Nature, 411, 195-199.
Kamitani, Y., & Tong, F. (2005)
Decoding the visual and subjective contents of the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 679-685.
Harrison, S. A., & Tong, F. (2009)
Decoding reveals the contents of visual working memory in early visual areas. Nature, 458, 632-635.
Cohen, E. C., & Tong, F. (2015)
Neural mechanisms of object-based attention. Cerebral Cortex, 25(4), 1080-1092.
Ling, S., Pratte, M. S., & Tong, F. (2015)
Attention alters orientation processing in the human lateral geniculate nucleus. Nature Neuroscience, 18(4), 496-498.
Jang, H., McCormack, D., & Tong, F. (2021)
Noise-trained deep neural networks effectively predict human vision and its neural responses to challenging images. PLoS Biology, 19(12):e3001418, 1-27.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Tong, Frank Vanderbilt University faculty Princeton University faculty Queen's University at Kingston alumni Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni 1970s births Scientists from Toronto Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 21st-century Canadian psychologists Vision scientists