James V. Haxby

James Van Loan Haxby is an American neuroscientist. He currently is a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College and was the Director for the Dartmouth Center for Cognitive Neuroscience from 2008 to 2021. He is best known for his work on face perception and applications of machine learning in functional neuroimaging.

Education Haxby received a BA from Carleton College in 1973 and completed a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Bonn in 1974. He obtained a PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Minnesota in 1981. and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth, He has also proposed an influential model of face perception where certain brain areas process invariant face properties such identity, while others process dynamic features critical for social interaction, such as emotional expressions and eye gaze. Haxby has played a critical role in introducing machine learning methods to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data analysis. This approach was popularized by a paper demonstrating that neural representations of faces and object categories are encoded in a distributed fashion in human ventral temporal cortex, a position that is typically contrasted with more modular accounts of the functional neuroanatomy of face processing. More recently, Haxby's research has focused on the cortical topographies mediating fine-grained semantic representation, methods for functional brain alignment, and using naturalistic stimuli (e.g., movies) to build computational models of neural representation that are common across individuals. He is a vocal proponent of open science.