Thomas F. Shipley is associate professor of Psychology.  As a graduate student he studied with Robert Rescorla, Henry Gleitman and Elizabeth Spelke.  He worked as a post doctoral researcher with Philip Kellman.  He is interested in visual perception, spatial reasoning, and perception action coordination, and food.  His recent research has addressed the question of how human actions are recognized, including limits on the role of previous visual experience; the nature of action representations, and the importance of dynamics. His work on event segmentation grew out of his previous work on object segmentation; a subset of event segmentation - path segmentation - is mathematically related to object segmentation. Dr. Shipley is collaborating with Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff, The University of Delaware, to study event perception in infants.  Dr. Shipley and Jeffrey Zacks, Washington University, are co-editing a book on events.

Dr. Shipley is working with Cedric Bouquet, University of Poitier, and Peter Marshall to study perception-action coupling.  This includes research in adults and children on motor contagion (influences of watching someone else act on ones ongoing action), and imitation of novel complex actions.

Dr. Shipley is also part of the RISC (Research in Spatial Cognition) group in Nora Newcombe’s Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center where he is working on eye movements in mental rotation and segmentation of large spaces.