Neurophysiology of Visual Learning, Memory and Recognition

We have a remarkable ability to learn from our experiences. Through experience, we learn to interpret the meaning of the sights and sounds around us and to behave in ways that move us closer to achieving our goals. This capacity to learn from and adapt to our ever changing environment is a foundation of complex behavior, as it allows us to make sense of incoming sensory stimuli and to plan successful behavioral responses. While much is known about the neural processing of simple visual features such as color, orientation and direction of motion,  less is known about how the brain learns, stores, recognizes and recalls the behavioral significance, or meaning, of our sensory experiences.

Our goal is to understand how visual feature encoding in sensory brain areas is transformed into  more abstract and experience-dependent representations that reflect the behavioral significance of stimuli. We use advanced neurophysiological techniques to monitor neuronal activity in multiple brain areas during  visual learning, memory and recognition tasks. Visual categorization tasks have been useful tools for investigating how visual representations are transformed through learning. Previously, we compared  neuronal activity in frontal, temporal and parietal lobes during visual categorization, and found that parietal and frontal lobe neurons reflected the learned category membership of visual stimuli. This contrasted sharply with activity in brain areas considered to be more involved in sensory processing (such as the middle temporal and inferior temporal cortices) which seemed more involved in visual feature encoding and did not reflect more abstract information about stimuli. Understanding how feature-based encoding in visual cortex is transformed into more abstract and meaningful representations in subsequent neuronal processing stages is a central goal of our research.

Several positions are currently available in the lab for both graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and interested candidates are encouraged to contact us.