Neural Mechanisms of Object Recognition

描述（由申请人提供）：神经科学的一个基本目标是了解大脑神经元活动与感知之间的联系。物体识别是视觉感知的一个重要方面：人类能够很容易地快速识别物体，而不依赖于物体大小、位置、照明和姿态的变化。虽然大量的工作表明，下颞叶皮层（IT）参与物体识别，许多问题仍然存在的神经元机制，在大脑中的对象表征和注意力是如何被导向这些表示。这项拟议中的研究将利用一个独特的机会，直接从清醒、行为正常的患者的大脑中获得神经生理学记录，从而研究这些重要问题。PI将同时记录人类IT中的电生理活动和受试者在一系列物体识别任务中的感知表现，这些任务旨在测量物体识别的三个重要方面：不变性，注意力和可靠性。这些研究将由PI（一名具有脑映射和癫痫手术临床背景的神经外科医生）进行，由一名主要对视觉处理的神经生理学感兴趣的高级神经科学家进行主要指导，并由神经外科系主任进行额外指导，该主任在手术室应用的基础和临床神经生理学方面具有丰富的经验，以及一位精通人类心理物理学的高级神经心理学家通过增强我们对大脑如何创造视觉世界的行为相关表征的理解，这项研究可能会帮助数百万患有认知缺陷的美国人，如中风或头部受伤后的视觉失认症。该研究计划将通过神经生理学和神经心理学课程以及经验丰富的贝勒教师咨询委员会的监督来补充，该委员会包括两名神经科学家，一名神经心理学家，一名神经外科医生和一名临床神经生理学家。这项职业发展奖的研究和培训部分将共同作为Pl建立人类认知神经生理学独立研究计划的长期目标的基础。

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.