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中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：人类很容易能够快速识别物体，而不受物体大小、位置、照明和姿势的变化的影响。虽然大量的研究表明，颞下皮层（IT）参与了物体识别，但关于大脑中物体表征的神经元机制以及注意力是如何被引导到这些表征上的，仍然存在许多问题。拟议的研究将利用一个独特的机会来研究这些重要的问题，即直接从清醒的行为患者的大脑中获得神经生理学记录。PI将同时记录人类IT的电生理活动和受试者在一系列目标识别任务中的感知表现，这些任务旨在测量目标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π,大脑神经外科医生的临床背景映射和癫痫手术,在高级神经科学家的主要指导初级视觉信息处理的神经生理学,兴趣和额外的指导神经外科学系的从椅子上,有着丰富的经验在基础和临床神经生理学应用于手术室,在人类心理物理学和高级神经心理学家专业知识。通过加强我们对大脑如何创造与视觉世界行为相关的表征的理解，这项研究可能会帮助数百万在中风或头部受伤后患有视觉失认症等认知缺陷的美国人。该研究项目将辅以神经生理学和神经心理学课程，并由经验丰富的贝勒学院教师组成的咨询委员会监督，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。这一职业发展奖项的研究和培训部分将共同为Pl建立人类认知神经生理学独立研究项目的长期目标奠定基础。

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.