She has worked on an unusually wide range of topics; the citation for her lifetime achievement award from the Association for Psychological Science states that “Her studies on the topics of mental imagery, face recognition, semantic memory, reading, attention, and executive functioning have become classics in the field.” Farah has undergraduate degrees in Metallurgy and Philosophy from MIT, and a doctorate in Psychology from Harvard University.
Her research revealed a striking degree of division of labor, with specialized systems for a various categories of stimuli and types of information, and was summarized in The Cognitive Neuroscience of Vision (Wiley-Blackwell, 2000) and in the second edition of Visual Agnosia (MIT Press, 2004).
Farah was also among the first information-processing psychologists to use the behavior of neurological patients to test cognitive theories, starting in the early 1980s.
This criticism is only valid for certain types of computational architectures, and one of Farah’s contributions was to develop parallel distributed processing models of neuropsychological impairments.
In recent years, Farah has shifted her research focus to a new set of issues that lie at the interface between cognitive neuroscience and the real world.