MyGlasgow News

A University of Glasgow academic is set for an Asian research trip after receiving an Invitation Fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Dr Rob Jenkins, Senior Lecturer at the University’s School of Psychology, will head to Kyoto in June to begin a three-month project at the Kokoro Research Centre.

The Invitation Fellowship Program, funded by the Japanese government, aims to increase international cooperation and knowledge exchange by encouraging Japanese researchers to collaborate with colleagues from other parts of the world. Dr Jenkins was invited to participate by Professor Sakiko Yoshikawa, a cognitive psychologist at Kyoto University.

Dr Jenkins said: "This is a fantastic opportunity to strengthen the research links between the UK and Japan. The JSPS Invitation Fellowship has allowed us to design a programme of cross-site experiments that involve data collection in both countries.  The project is genuinely international, in the sense that neither party could attempt the research alone.

“Thanks to this generous scheme, we will be able to make advances that would otherwise not be possible."

Previous research has demonstrated that people are more likely to accurately identify the faces and read the emotional expressions of people from their own race than people from other races.

Dr Jenkins and Professor Yoshikawa aim to deepen understanding of face recognition by examining for the first time the ways in which people identify the same person under different conditions. Their research will look more closely at how British and Japanese people respond to faces by showing participants groups of photos of the same face which vary in their lighting, pose, age and expression.

The work has implications for face recognition systems in applied settings such as border control in addition to cross-cultural social interaction more generally.

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First published: 30 January 2013