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Despite
the fact that visual scenes may contain multiple objects and people,
humans
can recognize the objects and individuals with ease and accuracy.
Research
in my lab focuses on studying how this is achieved - what are the
necessary
psychological processes and representations that underlie abilities
such
as object segmentation and recognition, face recognition, mental imagery,
reading
and writing and spatial attention? Although these questions are asked
within
the framework of information-processing models used in cognitive
psychology,
I am also interested in identifying the neural mechanisms which
are
responsible for these complex abilities.
The
major approach I use to address these questions is to study the behavior
of
human adults who have sustained brain damage (usually through stroke or
head
injury) which selectively affects their ability to carry out these processes.
For
example, some patients are impaired at recognizing faces (prosopagnosia),
some
are impaired at recognizing objects (visual object agnosia) and some are
unable
to represent visuospatial information (hemispatial neglect). By examining
patterns
of associations and dissociations among abilities after brain damage,
one
can make inferences about the functional and structural organization of
the
brain.
This neuropsychological approach is combined with several other methods:
experiments
from traditional cognitive psychology paradigms (analyzing the
response
latencies and accuracies of normal subjects); simulations of artificial
neural
networks which may be used to model these processes and their breakdown
following
brain-damage; and functional neuroimaging studies which examine the
biological
substrate of high-level vision.
A final
thread to my research is to conduct rehabilitation studies with the brain
damaged
subjects in order to treat the observed deficit. Carefully planned
rehabilitation
studies provide valuable information which can shed light on the
mechanisms
underlying visual cognition.. |
