Neural Mechanisms of Object Recognition

描述(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的活动和知觉之间的联系。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，而不受物体大小、位置、照明和姿势的影响。虽然大量的工作表明，颞下皮质(IT)参与了物体识别，但关于大脑中物体表征背后的神经机制以及注意力如何被引导到这些表征上，仍然存在许多问题。这项拟议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取神经生理学记录，从而研究这些重要的问题。PI将同时记录人类IT中的电生理活动和受试者在一系列对象识别任务中的知觉表现，这些任务旨在测量对象识别的三个重要方面：不变性、注意力和可靠性。这些研究将由具有脑部测绘和癫痫外科临床背景的神经外科医生进行，由一名对视觉处理的神经生理学最感兴趣的资深神经科学家担任主要指导，并由在手术室应用基础和临床神经生理学方面拥有丰富经验的神经外科主任和一名具有人类心理物理学专业知识的高级神经心理学家提供补充指导。通过加强我们对大脑如何创建与行为相关的视觉世界表征的理解，这项研究可能会帮助数百万患有认知缺陷的美国人，比如中风或头部受伤后的视觉失认。这项研究计划将得到神经生理学和神经心理学课程的补充，以及由经验丰富的贝勒教职员工组成的咨询委员会的监督，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。总而言之，这一职业发展奖的研究和培训部分将作为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.