Campus Directory

Division Social Sciences Division

Department/College/Unit Psychology Department

Title Professor

Affiliation Faculty

Other UCSC Campus Affiliation Center for Statistical Analysis in the Social Sciences
Cowell College
Crown College

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Areas of Expertise Perception
Cognition
Cognitive Science
Computational Modeling
Mathematical Modeling
Psychology
Neuroscience
Programming
Virtual Reality, Immersive, and Augmented Reality Environments

Web Site

Primary Office Location Social Sciences 2
377

Additional Location(s) zoom: contact instructor to schedule an appointment

Office Hours for Students/ Office Hours (Winter 2025) Wed., 11 am - 12 pm; Social Sciences 2 Rm 377

Mail Stop Psychology Faculty Services

Biography, Education and Training

Ph.D. in Psychology, Stanford University
M.S. in Statistics, Stanford University
A.B. in Mathematics, Harvard University

Summary of Expertise

Face perception and recognition
Modeling cognitive and neural mechanisms of high level visual representation

Research Interests

My research focuses on the cognitive, perceptual, and neural mechanisms by which we represent visual information; specifically, high-level visual information like objects and faces.

A major goal of my research is to understand how we perceive and recognize faces, and how we can use this understanding to advance methods of reconstructing faces from memory. In my lab, we generate parametric stimuli and conduct behavioral experiments and computational modeling to predict human performance.

Selected Publications

• Davidenko, N., Cheong, Y., Waterman, A., Smith, J., Anderson, B., Harmon, S. (2018).  The influence of visual and vestibular orientation cues in a clock reading task. Consciousness and Cognition. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2018.05.005
• Davidenko, N., & Heller, N. H. (2018). Primed and unprimed rebounding illusory apparent motion. Attention Perception and Psychophysics, 80(2), 307-315.
• Day, J., & Davidenko, N. (2018). Physical and perceptual accuracy of upright and inverted face drawings. Visual Cognition, 26(2), 89-99.
• Heller, N. H., & Davidenko, N. (2018). Dissociating higher and lower order visual motion systems by priming illusory apparent motion. Perception 47(1), 30-43.
• Davidenko, N., Heller, N. H., Cheong, Y., & Smith, J. (2017). Persistent illusory apparent motion in sequences of uncorrelated random dots. Journal of Vision, 17(3):19, 1–17.
• Davidenko, N., Vu, C. Q., Heller, N. H., & Collins, J. M. (2016). Attending to Race (or Gender) Does Not Increase Race (or Gender) Aftereffects. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 909, 1-10.
• Paxman, R. G., Carrara, D. A., Walker, P. D., & Davidenko, N. (2014). Silhouette estimation. Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 31:7, 1636-1644.
• Davidenko, N., Remus D., & Grill-Spector, K. (2012). Face-likeness and image variability drive responses in human face-selective ventral regions. Human Brain Mapping 33(10), 2334-2349.doi: 10.1002/hbm.21367.
• Davidenko, N., & Flusberg, S. (2012). Environmental inversion effects in face perception. Cognition, 123(3), 442-447. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2012.02.009.
• Davidenko, N., Witthoft, N., Winawer, J. (2008). Gender aftereffects in face silhouettes reveal face-specific mechanisms. Visual Cognition 16, 1, 99-103.
• Davidenko, N. (2007). Silhouetted face profiles: A new methodology for face perception research. Journal of Vision 7(4):6, 1-17, http://journalofvision.org/7/4/6/, doi:10.1167/7.4.6.

Courses Psyc 121: Perception
Psyc 139K: Face recognition (senior seminar)
Psyc 139L: Illusions
Psyc 138M: Matlab for Cognitive Science