The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Timothy Brady with the 2020 Young Investigator Award.

The Young Investigator Award is an award given to an early stage researcher who has already made a significant contribution to our field. The award is sponsored by Elsevier, and the awardee is invited to submit a review paper to Vision Research highlighting this contribution.

Timothy Brady

Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
University of California, San Diego

The 2020 Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award goes to Professor Timothy Brady for his fundamental contributions to the scientific study of visual memory. Tim Brady is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology, UCSD. After completing his undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science at Yale University, Prof Brady did his PhD with Aude Oliva at MIT and then post-doctoral research with George Alvarez at Harvard University.

Prof Brady uses a combination of behavioral methods, cognitive neuroscience techniques and computational modelling to probe representations in the visual system and the processes by which visual information is encoded in working memory and integrated into long-term
storage. He has made numerous surprising discoveries about the extreme fidelity and detail of visual long-term memories for objects and scenes, and has demonstrated how statistical learning and ensemble encoding of features facilitates the maintenance and storage of complex stimuli like natural scenes. Prof Brady’s work has helped broaden the study of working memory to include richer, more naturalistic stimuli, and repeatedly challenged long-standing assumptions about the nature of visual representations. In a series of highly-cited studies he has shown how remembered objects are stored as groups of distinct parts that can be independently forgotten, and that when multiple items must be remembered, the brain computes summary statistics across the group. Prof Brady is not only a gifted and productive experimentalist—he has also made substantial contributions to the theoretical understanding of visual memory representations through computational modelling, as well as providing numerous useful tools for the community.

The nature of visual memory

Professor Brady will speak during the Awards session,
Saturday, May 22, 2021, 4:30 – 5:30 pm EDT.

In the real world, objects are discrete physical entities – your coffee mug either is or is not in your hand. As a result, both in everyday life and in memory research, there is a tendency to use a physical metaphor to understand memory: people tend to think of an object they are trying to remember as either in mind or not in their mind, and to say that we hold items in mind, as we hold real objects in our hand. This metaphor serves as a core mental model used in most conceptions of memory: all-or-none, discrete, and functioning at the level of entire objects or other discrete representations or chunks. In this brief talk, I’ll argue for a new way of thinking about memory that strongly contrasts with this common and intuitive view. I’ll show that individuated items are far from the only kind of representation people form, and that it is necessary to consider interactions among an entire hierarchy of representations (from semantic knowledge to ensemble information, chunks and items) to understand memory even for a single item. Next, I’ll show that memory representations, even for single items, are population-based and continuous in strength. Altogether, I’ll argue that even for those interested in cognition, analogies from neuroscience — with population codes, hierarchical representations and noisy signals — best allow us to understand memory limits, rather than physical analogies about discrete items.

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Dr. Marlene Behrmann with the 2020 Davida Teller Award

VSS established the Davida Teller Award in 2013. Davida was an exceptional scientist, mentor and colleague, who for many years led the field of visual development. The award is therefore given to an outstanding female vision scientist in recognition of her exceptional, lasting contributions to the field of vision science.

Marlene Behrmann

University Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Carnegie Mellon University
Marlene Behrmann received her B.A. in Speech and Hearing Therapy in 1981, followed by her M.A. in Speech Pathology in 1984, both from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She then obtained a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Toronto in 1991. She was a Research Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto before moving to Carnegie Mellon University in 1993, where she is currently a University Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience. Dr. Behrmann was elected a member of the Society for Experimental Psychologists in 2008, inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 2015, and into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. Her prior recognitions include the Presidential Early Career in Science and Engineering and the Fred Kavli Distinguished Career Contributions in Cognitive Neurosciences Award.

Dr. Behrmann is a trailblazer and a world leader in the field of visual cognition. Her work represents the best of cognitive neuroscience, seamlessly blending insights gained from neuropsychology, modeling, cutting-edge functional and structural brain imaging, and behavioral experiments. She has made major contributions across a wide range of topics, including attention, the neural basis of autism, specialization between hemispheres in the brain, face recognition and disorders of face recognition, visual object recognition, word recognition, and visual imagery. Dr. Behrman’s work is characterized by her remarkable ability to examine an issue rigorously from many vantage points, and from there to develop, test, and refine theories of how a given behavior arises from the underlying brain function. In addition, she has an exceptional record of mentorship throughout her career in promoting and supporting students at all stages. Dr. Behrmann embodies the characteristics that we so admired in Davida Teller, and it is with pride that the Society recognizes her accomplishments through the Davida Teller Award.

Hemispheric organization and pattern recognition

Dr. Behrmann will speak during the Awards session,
Saturday, May 22, 2021, 4:30 – 5:30 pm EDT.
Despite the overall similarity in structure, the two hemispheres of the human brain have somewhat different functions. A traditional view of hemispheric organization asserts that there are independent and largely lateralized domain-specific visual regions in ventral occipitotemporal, specialized, if not dedicated, and perhaps innate, for the recognition of distinct classes of objects such as words and faces. In this talk, I will offer an alternative account of the organization of the hemispheres. I will present an account of interactive and graded organization of both within- and between-hemisphere organization. The crux of the account is that mature hemispheric organization emerges from a competitive and collaborative dynamic in which in right-handers, during the acquisition of literacy, word recognition comes to be co-localized with language lateralization in the left hemisphere. Consequently, face recognition is shifted, albeit not entirely, to the right hemisphere. Behavioral and imaging data from adults and over development will provide evidence to support this hypothesis of graded asymmetry.
Last, I will show that this pattern of organization is malleable and that, in children who have had a unilateral posterior cortical resection, the preserved hemisphere can subserve both word and face recognition. Together, these findings support a dynamic interactive process by which hemispheric organization emerges and unfolds with experience.

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Edward Adelson with the 2020 Ken Nakayama Medal for Excellence in Vision Science.

The Ken Nakayama Medal is in honor of Professor Ken Nakayama’s contributions to the Vision Sciences Society, as well as his innovations and excellence to the domain of vision sciences.

The recipient of the Ken Nakayama Medal receives this honor for high-impact work that has made a lasting contribution in vision science in the broadest sense. The nature of this work can be fundamental, clinical or applied.

Edward ‘Ted’ Adelson

John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Vision Science, MIT

Edward ‘Ted’ Adelson received his B.A. in Physics & Philosophy in 1974 from Yale University, followed by a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Michigan (1979). After a postdoctoral position at NYU he became a research scientist at RCA labs. Ted then joined the faculty at MIT in 1987, first in the Media Lab, before moving to the department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences in 1994. Currently, Ted is the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Vision Science at MIT, in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Ted has received many prior awards and is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Over his career Ted has made fundamental and wide-ranging contributions to the scientific study of vision and perception. His work is the stuff of textbooks and perception courses, and the illusions he has discovered have inspired and beguiled researchers and the general public alike. Indeed, Ted is able to bring visual phenomena to a highly purified state, so that his demonstrations will remain standard references for generations to come. More generally, Ted’s work bridges across the full range of vision science, and includes seminal contributions to theory, psychophysics, computational modelling, and neurophysiology. From low-level mechanisms of retinal adaptation, to the motion energy model, texture processing, lightness perception, pyramid decompositions, the plenoptic function, ‘things’ vs ‘stuff’ and material perception, practically everything Ted has done has opened new avenues of investigation and understanding in ways that have helped define the field. He is also known as an amazing supervisor, and many of his trainees have themselves gone on to make fundamental contributions to our understanding of vision. Ted Adelson easily meets, several times over, the Nakayama Award’s criterion of having made exceptional, lasting contributions to vision science.

Dr. Adelson will speak during the Awards session,
Saturday, May 22, 2021, 4:30 – 5:30 pm EDT.

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Talia Konkle with the 2019 Young Investigator Award.

The Young Investigator Award is an award given to an early stage researcher who has already made a significant contribution to our field. The award is sponsored by Elsevier, and the awardee is invited to submit a review paper to Vision Research highlighting this contribution.

Talia Konkle

Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
Harvard University

Talia Konkle earned Bachelor degrees in applied mathematics and in cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley.  Under the direction of Aude Oliva, she earned a PhD in Brain & Cognitive Science at MIT in 2011. Following exceptionally productive years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at Harvard and at the University of Trento, in 2015, Dr. Konkle assumed a faculty position in the Department of Psychology & Center for Brain Science at Harvard.

Dr. Konkle’s research to understand how our visual system organizes knowledge of objects, actions, and scenes combines elegant behavioral methods with modern analysis of brain activity and cutting-edge computational theories. Enabled by sheer originality and analytical rigor, she creates and crosses bridges between previously unrelated ideas and paradigms, producing highly cited publications in top journals. One line of research demonstrated that object processing mechanisms relate to the physical size of objects in the world. Pioneering research on massive visual memory, Dr. Konkle also showed that detailed visual long-term memory retrieval is linked more to conceptual than perceptual properties.

Dr. Konkle’s productive laboratory is a vibrant training environment, attracting many graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Dr. Konkle has also been actively involved in outreach activities devoted to promoting women and minorities in science.

From what things look like to what they are

Dr. Konkle will talk during the Awards Session
Monday, May 20, 2019, 12:30 – 1:45 pm, Talk Room 1-2

How do we see and recognize the world around us, and how do our brains organize all of this perceptual input? In this talk I will highlight some of the current research being conducted in my lab, exploring the representation of objects, actions, and scenes in the mind and brain.

 

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The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Dr. Barbara Dosher with the 2019 Davida Teller Award

VSS established the Davida Teller Award in 2013. Davida was an exceptional scientist, mentor and colleague, who for many years led the field of visual development. The award is therefore given to an outstanding female vision scientist in recognition of her exceptional, lasting contributions to the field of vision science.

Barbara Dosher

Distinguished Professor, University of California, Irvine

Barbara Dosher is a researcher in the areas of visual attention and learning. She received her PhD in 1977 from the University of Oregon and served on the faculty at Columbia University (1977 – 1992) and the University of California, Irvine (1992 – present). Her early career investigated temporal properties of retrieval from long-term and working memory, and priming using pioneering speed-accuracy tradeoff methods. She then transitioned to work largely in vision, bringing some of the concepts of cue combination in memory to initiate work on combining cues in visual perception. This was followed by work to develop observer models using external noise methods that went on to be the basis for proposing that changing templates, stimulus amplification, and noise filtering were the primary functions of attention. This and similar work then constrained and motivated new generative network models of visual perceptual learning that have been used to understand the roles of feedback in unsupervised and supervised learning, the induction of bias in perception, and the central contributions of reweighting evidence to a decision in visual learning.

Barbara Dosher is an elected member of the Society for Experimental Psychologists and the National Academy of Sciences, and is a recipient of the Howard Crosby Warren Medal (2013) and the Atkinson Prize (2018).

Learning and Attention in Visual Perception

Dr. Dosher will speak during the Awards session
Monday, May 20, 2019, 12:30 – 1:45 pm, Talk Room 1-2.

Visual perception functions in the context of a dynamic system that is affected by experience and by top-down goals and strategies. Both learning and attention can improve perception that is limited by the noisiness of internal visual processes and noise in the environment. This brief talk will illustrate several examples of how learning and attention can improve how well we see by amplifying relevant stimuli while filtering others—and how important it is to model the coding or transformation of early features in the development of truly generative quantitative models of perceptual performance.

 

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Concetta Morrone with the 2019 Ken Nakayama Medal for Excellence in Vision Science.

The Ken Nakayama Medal is in honor of Professor Ken Nakayama’s contributions to the Vision Sciences Society, as well as his innovations and excellence to the domain of vision sciences.

The winner of the Ken Nakayama Medal receives this honor for high-impact work that has made a lasting contribution in vision science in the broadest sense. The nature of this work can be fundamental, clinical or applied.

Concetta Morrone

Professor of Physiology
Department of Translational Research on New
Technologies in Medicine and Surgery
University of Pisa

The brain architecture underlying our incredibly powerful and versatile visual system is best unravelled using multiple parallel approaches, including development, computational modelling, psychophysics, functional imaging and electrophysiology, in a truly interdisciplinary manner. This is the approach Concetta Morrone has adopted to understand how we segment visual scenes into functional objects, how the visual brain dynamically interacts with the motor system in crucial moments, such as eye-, head- and body-movements, how the brain plastically reorganizes itself for optimal visual processing during development and neuronal diseases. Concetta, in close collaboration with David Burr, has contributed to all these fundamental questions, introducing new concepts and verifying them quantitatively. There are various examples of this approach, including the reorganization of spatio-temporal receptive fields to retune the retinotopy of associative cortex on each saccade to mediate perceptual stability; the reorganization and change of specialization of associative cortex when primary visual pathways are damaged in hemianopia or blind-sight; the dynamic selection of salient spatial features by the Local Energy Model; and how the developing brain controls and calibrates dynamic reorganization and its residual capability in adulthood.

Concetta Morrone graduated in with a degree in Physics from the University of Pisa in 1977 and trained in Biophysics at the elite Scuola Normale Superiore from 1973 to 1980. Following research positions at the University of Western Australia, the Scuola Normale Superiore and the CNR Institute of Neuroscience in Pisa, she was appointed Professor of Psychophysiology in the Faculty of Psychology at the Università Vita-salute San Raffaele (Milan) in 2000. Since 2008, she has been a Professor of Physiology in the School of Medicine of the University of Pisa. In 2014 Concetta was elected a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, the Italian equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society of London. In 2014 she was awarded an ERC-IDEA advanced grant, a distinction of excellence in Europe.

Dr. Morrone will speak during the Awards session
Monday, May 20, 2019, 12:30 – 1:45 pm, Talk Room 1-2.

Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Melissa Le-Hoa Võ with the 2018 Young Investigator Award.

The Young Investigator Award is an award given to an early stage researcher who has already made a significant contribution to our field. The award is sponsored by Elsevier, and the awardee is invited to submit a review paper to Vision Research highlighting this contribution.

Melissa Le-Hoa Võ

Professor of Cognitive Psychology, Goethe Universität Frankfurt; Head of the DFG-funded Emmy Noether Group, Scene Grammar Lab, Goethe Universität Frankfurt

Reading Scenes: How Scene Grammar Guides Attention and Perception in Real-World Environments

Dr. Võ will talk during the Awards Session
Monday, May 21, 2018, 12:30 – 1:30 pm, Talk Room 1-2

How do you recognize that little bump under the blanket as being your kid’s favorite stuffed animal? What no state-of-the-art deep neural network or sophisticated object recognition algorithm can do, is easily done by your toddler. This might seem trivial, however, the enormous efficiency of human visual cognition is actually not yet well understood.

Visual perception is much more than meets the eye. While bottom-up features are of course an essential ingredient of visual perception, my work has mainly focused on the role of the “invisible” determinants of visual cognition, i.e. the rules and expectations that govern scene understanding. Objects in scenes — like words in sentences — are arranged according to a “grammar”, which allows us to immediately understand objects and scenes we have never seen before. Studying scene grammar therefore provides us with the fascinating opportunity to study the inner workings of our mind as it makes sense of the world and interacts with its complex surroundings. In this talk, I will highlight some recent projects from my lab in which we have tried to shed more light on the influence of scene grammar on visual search, object perception and memory, its developmental trajectories, as well as its role in the ad-hoc creation of scenes in virtual reality scenarios. For instance, we found that so-called “anchor objects” play a crucial role in guiding attention and anchoring predictions about other elements within a scene, thereby laying the groundwork for efficient visual processing. This opens up exciting new avenues for investigating the building blocks of our visual world that our Scene Grammar Lab is eager to pursue.

Elsevier/Vision Research Article

Biography

Melissa Võ received her PhD from the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich in 2009. She then moved on to perform postdoctoral work, first with John Henderson at the University of Edinburgh, and then with Jeremy Wolfe at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Võ’s work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including grants from the NIH and the German Research Council. In 2014, Melissa Võ moved back to Germany where as freshly appointed Full Professor for Cognitive Psychology she set up the Scene Grammar Lab at the Goethe University Frankfurt.

Dr. Võ is a superb scientist who has already had an extraordinary impact on our field. Her distinctive contribution has been to develop the concept of “scene grammar”, particularly scrutinizing the distinction between semantics and syntax in visual scenes. The distinction can be illustrated by considering scene components that are semantically incongruent (e.g. a printer in a kitchen) versus those that are syntactically incongruent (e.g. a cooking pot in a kitchen, floating in space rather than resting on a counter). Dr. Võ has used eye-tracking and EEG techniques in both children and adults to demonstrate that the brain processes semantic and syntactic visual information differentially, and has shown that scene grammar not only aids visual processing but also plays a key role in efficiently guiding search in real-world scenarios. Her work has implications in many areas, ranging from computer science to psychiatry. In addition to being a tremendously innovative and productive researcher, Dr. Võ is an active mentor of younger scientists and an award-winning teacher. Her outstanding contributions make her a highly worthy recipient of the 12th VSS Young Investigator Award.

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The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present George Sperling with the 2018 Ken Nakayama Medal for Excellence in Vision Science.

The Ken Nakayama Medal is in honor of Professor Ken Nakayama’s contributions to the Vision Sciences Society, as well as his innovations and excellence to the domain of vision sciences.

The winner of the Ken Nakayama Medal receives this honor for high-impact work that has made a lasting contribution in vision science in the broadest sense. The nature of this work can be fundamental, clinical or applied. The Medal is not a lifetime career award and is open to all career stages.

George Sperling

Department of Cognitive Sciences, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, and the Institute of Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, University of California, Irvine

Five encounters with physical and physics-like models in vision science

Dr. Sperling will talk during the Awards session
Monday, May 21, 2018, 12:30 – 1:30 pm, Talk Room 1-2.

Two early concepts in a vision course are photons and visual angles:

1. Every second, a standard candle produces 5.1×10¹⁶ photons, enough to produce 6.8×10⁶ photons for every one of the 7.7×10⁹ persons on earth–a very bright flash (68,000*threshold) if delivered to the pupil. Obviously, photons pass seamlessly through each other or we’d be in a dense fog. And, the unimaginably large number of photons solves the ancients’ problem: How can the light from a candle produce a detailed image behind a tiny, ¼ inch pupil that captures only an infinitesimal fraction of the meager candlelight reflected off relatively distant surfaces?

2. The visual angles of the moon (0.525°) and the sun (0.533°) are almost the same although their physical sizes are enormously different. Occlusion demo: A solar eclipse on a reduced scale in which the earth is 1/4 inch diam, the moon is 1/16 inch diam 7.5 inch away, and the sun is a 27 inch beach ball 250 ft away. Note: The beach ball nearest the sun, Alpha Centauri, is 12,200 mi away.

3. A simply dynamical system of a marble rolling under the influence of gravity in a bowl (filled with a viscous fluid) whose shape is distorted by the covariance of the images in the two eyes. The marble’s position can represent the vergence angle of horizontal, vertical, or torsional vergence of the eyes, or of binocular fusion; the bowl’s shape represents the bistable nature of these processes (Sperling, 1970).

4. A simple RC electrical circuit–a capacitor that stores an electrical charge that leaks away through the resistor–illustrates exponential decay. When the resistance is allowed to vary, it represents shunting inhibition in a neuron. A feedforward shunting inhibition circuit models the compression of the 106 range of visual inputs into the approximately 30:1 useful range of neural signals, and also the concurrent changes in visual receptive field structure (Sperling and Sondhi, 1968). A constant noise source after the range compression produces a S/N ratio inversely proportional to the average input intensity, i.e., a Weber Law (Sperling, 1989).

5. A similar feedback shunting-gain-control system efficiently models mechanisms of top-down spatial, temporal, and feature attention. Example: Reeves and Sperling, 1986: A simple 3 -parameter model of the shift of visual attention from one rapid stream to an adjacent stream of characters (an attention reaction-time paradigm) accurately accounts for over 200 data points from variants of this procedure.

Biography

George Sperling attended public school in New York City. He received a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Michigan, an M.A. from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from Harvard, both in Experimental Psychology.

For his doctoral thesis, Sperling introduced the method of partial report to measure the capacity and decay rate of visual sensory memory, which was renamed iconic memory by Ulrich Neisser. To measure the information outflow from iconic memory, Sperling introduced post-stimulus masking to terminate iconic persistence, and confirmed this with an auditory synchronization paradigm: Subjects adjusted an auditory click to be simultaneous with the perceived onset and on other trials with the perceived termination of visible information. The interclick duration defined the duration of visible persistence.

Sperling’s first theoretical venture was a feed-forward gain control model based on shunting inhibition, formalized with a mathematician, Mohan Sondhi. It accounted for the change of visual flicker sensitivity with light intensity and for Barlow’s observation that visual receptive fields change from pure excitation in the dark to antagonistic center-surround in the light. Subsequently, Sperling observed that this same model, with internal noise following the gain control, also accounted for Weber’s Law. For binocular vision, Sperling proposed a dynamic, energy-well model (a pre-catastrophe theory “catastrophe” model) to account for multiple stable states in vergence-accommodation as well as for Julesz’s hysteresis phenomena in binocular fusion. With Jan van Santen, Sperling elaborated Reichardt’s beetle-motion-detection model for human psychophysics, and experimentally confirmed five counter-intuitive model predictions. Shortly afterwards, Charlie Chubb and Sperling defined a large class visual stimuli (which they called “second-order”) that were easily perceived as moving but were invisible to the Reichard model. These could be made visible to the Reichard model by prior contrast rectification (absolute value or square), thereby defining the visual pre-processing of a second motion system. With Zhong-Lin Lu, Sperling found yet another class of stimuli that produced a strong motion perceptions but were invisible to both Reichard (first-order) and second-order motion detecting systems. They proposed these stimuli were processed by a third-order motion system that operated on a salience map and, unlike the first- and second-order systems, was highly influenced by attention. To characterize these three motion-detection systems, they developed pure stimuli that exclusively stimulated each of the three motion system. More recently, Jian Ding and Sperling used interocular out-of-phase sinewave grating stimuli to precisely measure the contribution of each eye to a fused binocular percept. This method has been widely adopted to assess treatments of binocular disorders.

Twenty five years after his thesis work, Sperling returned to attention research with a graduate student, Adam Reeves, to study attention reaction times of unobservable shifts of visual attention which they measured with the same precision as concurrent finger-press motor reaction times. Their basic experiment was then greatly elaborated to produce hundreds different data points. A simple (3-parameter) attention gating model that involved briefly opening an attention gate to short-term memory accurately accounted for the hundreds of results. Subsequently, Erich Weichselgartner and Sperling showed that the shifts of visual attention in a Posner-type attention-cued reaction time experiment could be fully explained by independent spatial and temporal attention gates. In a study of dual visual attention tasks, Melvin Melchner and Sperling demonstrated the first Attention Operating Characteristics (AOCs). Sperling and Barbara Dosher showed how AOCs, the ROCs of Signal Detection Theory, and macro-economic theory all used the same underlying utility model. Shui-I Shih and Sperling revisited the partial-report paradigm to show that when attention shifted from one row of letters to another, attention moved concurrently to all locations. Together, these attention experiments showed that visual spatial attention functions like the transfer of power from one fixed spotlight to another, rather than like a moving spotlight. Most recently, Sperling, Peng Sun, Charlie Chubb, and Ted Wright, developed efficient methods for measuring the perceptual attention filters that define feature attention.

Sperling owes what success he has had to his many wonderful mentors and collaborators. Not fully satisfied with these fifty-plus years of research, Sperling still hopes to do better in the future.

 

Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Dr. Nancy Kanwisher with the 2018 Davida Teller Award

VSS established the Davida Teller Award in 2013. Davida was an exceptional scientist, mentor and colleague, who for many years led the field of visual development. The award is therefore given to an outstanding woman vision scientist with a strong history of mentoring.

Nancy Kanwisher

Walter A. Rosenblith Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Functional imaging of the brain as a window into the architecture of the human mind

Dr. Kanwisher will talk during the Awards Session
Monday, May 21, 2018, 12:30 – 1:30 pm, Talk Room 1-2

The last twenty years of fMRI research have given us a new sketch of the human mind, in the form of the dozens of cortical regions that have now been identified, many with remarkably specific functions. I will describe several ongoing lines of work in my lab on cortical regions engaged in perceiving social interactions, understanding the physical world, and perceiving music. After presenting various findings that use pattern analysis (MVPA), I will also raise caveats about this method, which can both fail to reveal information that we know is present in a given region, and which can also reveal information that is likely epiphenomenal. I’ll argue that  human cognitive neuroscience would greatly benefit from the invention of new tools to address these challenges.

Biography

My research uses fMRI and other methods to try to discover the functional organization of the brain as a window into the architecture of the human mind. My early forays in this work focused on high-level visual cortex, where my students and I developed the methods to test the functional profile of regions in the ventral visual pathway specialized for the perception of face, places, bodies, and words. The selectivity of these regions is now widely replicated, and ongoing work  in my lab and many other labs is now asking what exactly is represented and computed in each of these regions, how they arise both developmentally and evolutionarily, how they are structurally connected to each other and the rest of the brain, what the causal role of each is in behavior and perceptual awareness, and why, from a computational point of view, we have functional selectivity in the brain in the first place.

My career would quite simply never have happened without the great gift of fabulous mentors. Molly Potter fought to have me accepted to graduate school (from the bottom of the waiting list), and, against all reason, did not give up on me even when I dropped out of grad school three times to try to become a journalist.  Then after a diversionary postdoc in international security,  Anne Treisman gave me an incredible second chance in vision research as a postdoc in her lab, despite my scanty list of publications. Later in my own lab, my luck came in the form of spectacular mentees. I have had the enormous privilege and delight of working with many of the most brilliant young scientists in my field.

I think we scientists have an obligation to share the cool results of our work with the public (who pays for it). My latest effort in this direction is my growing collection of short lectures about human cognitive neuroscience for lay and undergraduate audiences: nancysbraintalks.mit.edu.

Members are appointed by the Board to a two-year term.

Julie Golomb, Chair
Davis Alais
Marc Ernst
Alex Huk
Mike Landy
Joo-Hyun Song