Isabelle Bülthoff

Isabelle Bülthoff is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, leading a group within the Department Human Perception, Cognition and Action. She specializes in human face recognition, utilizing psychophysical methods, eye-tracking, and immersive virtual environments, with a focus on memory precision for facial attributes like identity versus sex/race.

• Education:
  • Licence ès Sciences naturelles (1979), University of Lausanne
  • Ph.D in Zoology (1983), University of Lausanne
• Key Research Areas:
  • Processing differences between familiar/unfamiliar faces
  • Impact of body size and embodied cognition on perception
  • Cross-cultural studies of face/object recognition
  • Interplay of voice and visual information in recognition
• Collaborations:
  • Korea University
  • University of Malta
  • Max Planck Institute's Neuroscience Department

Her work demonstrates that idiosyncratic identity features are encoded with higher precision in memory compared to categorical information like race or sex. She has mentored PhD students on neural coding of faces and bodies, and her projects often combine immersive VR with traditional psychophysics.

Scientific Awards:

• Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship