Dr. Otto H. MacLin

 UNI Distinguished Scholar
 Professor
 Department of Psychology
 University of Northern Iowa
 
 Office: BAK 355
 Office Hours
 Phone: (319) 273-2373
 Fax: (319) 273-6188
 E-mail: Otto.MacLin@uni.edu

Background in Sensation & Perception:

I first became interested in Sensation and Perception (S&P) when I was a child trying to make sense of my world. I spent a lot of time in my head back then and never really knew S&P was something that was taught in college, but then when I was a kid I really didn't know there were such things as colleges : -)
 Academically, I became interested in S&P while studying for my masters degree under Dr. Bill Frederickson at the University of Central Oklahoma. My thesis was on face recognition and face perception. Later, after I arrived at the University of Nevada - Reno, I began working with Dr. Mike Webster in his color vision lab. I would sit in on his undergraduate S&P classes taking extensive notes because even back then I was sure that I would be teaching a class in S&P. I took several graduate seminar classes with Mike to gain a fuller appreciation of the field. While in Mike's lab we worked on several projects including our adaptation to faces research where we worked out the original methodology to study the phenomenon. During this time I received a highly competitive student award to present our research at ARVO.
 I continued to study the perceptual aspects of face recognition during my post doc stint at the University of Texas at El Paso with Dr. Roy Malpass where we discovered a new illusion called the 'Ambiguous Race Face Illusion.' I recently submitted a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation to study the cross-racial identification using racial markers. Currently, while at the University of Northern Iowa, we discovered another perceptual illusion that a student from my S&P class, Dwight Peterson, and I are currently writing up for publication purposes.