Neural Mechanisms of Object Recognition

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): A fundamental goal in neuroscience is to understand the link between the activity of neurons in the brain and perception. Object recognition is an important aspect of visual perception: Humans are readily able to rapidly recognize objects independent of variations in object size, position, illumination and pose. While a large body of work suggests that the inferotemporal cortex (IT) is involved in object recognition, many questions remain about the neuronal mechanisms that underlie object representations in the brain and how attention is directed to these representations. The proposed research will study these important questions by capitalizing on a unique opportunity to obtain neurophysiological recordings directly from human brain in awake, behaving patients. The PI will simultaneously record the electrophysiological activity in human IT and subjects' perceptual performance during a range of object recognition tasks that are designed to measure three important aspects of object recognition: invariance, attention, and reliability. These studies will be carried by the PI, a neurosurgeon with a clinical background in brain mapping and epilepsy surgery, under the primary mentorship of a senior neuroscientist with a primary interest in the neurophysiology of visual processing, and with additional mentoring from the Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery, who has extensive experience in basic and clinical neurophysiology applied in the operating room, and a senior neuropsychologist with expertise in human psychophysics. By enhancing our understanding of how the brain creates behaviorally relevant representations of the visual world, this research may help some of the millions of Americans who suffer from cognitive deficits such as visual agnosia after stroke or head injury. The research program will be complemented by coursework in neurophysiology and neuropsychology and by oversight by an advisory committee of experienced Baylor faculty that includes two neuroscientists, a neuropsychologist, a neurosurgeon, and a clinical neurophysiologist. Together, the research and training components of this career development award will serve as the foundation for the Pl's long term goal of establishing an independent research program in human cognitive neurophysiology.