Professor
Ph.D, University of Toronto
Area: Cognitive, Neuroscience

Contact information:
Email: behrmann+@cmu.edu
Psychology office: 331 Baker Hall
Psychology phone: 412-268-2790

Director, Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
Lab link: http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/~behrmann

Research Interests:

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.
 

Publications:

Scherf, S., Luna, B., Minshew, N. and Behrmann, M. (2010). Location, location, location: alterations in the functional topography of face- but not object- or place-related cortex in adolescents with autism, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2010.00026.

Nishimura, M., Doyle, J. and Behrmann, M. (2010). Probing the face-space of individuals with prosopagnosia, Neuropsychologia, 48, 1828-1841. Dinstein, I., Thomas, C., Humphreys, K., Minshew, N., Behrmann, M. and Heeger, D. (2010). Normal movement selectivity in autism, Neuron, 13;66(3):461-9.

Thomas, C., Avidan, G., Humphreys, K., Jung, K. J. , Gao, F. and Behrmann, M. (2009). Reduced structural connectivity in ventral visual cortex in congenital prosopagnosia, Nature Neuroscience, 12, 1, 29-31.

Avidan, G. and Behrmann, M. (2009). Functional MRI reveals compromised neural integrity of the face processing network in congenital prosopagnosia, Current Biology, 19, 13, 1146-1150.

Scherf, S., Luna, B., Minshew, N. and Behrmann, M. (2009). Atypical Development of Face-Related Activation in Autism. Frontiers in Neuroscience, in press.

Cate, A. and Behrmann, M. (2009). Perceiving shape from 3D concavities: “figural grounds?”, Attention, Perception and Performance, in press.

Hasson, U., Avidan, G., Gelbard, H., Vallines, I., Harel, M., Minshew, N. and Behrmann, M. (2009). Shared and idiosyncratic cortical activation patterns in autism revealed under continuous real-life viewing conditions. Autism Research, 2, 1-12.

Avidan, G. and Behrmann, M. (2009). Functional MRI reveals compromised neural integrity of the face processing network in congenital prosopagnosia, Current Biology, 19, 13, 1146-1150. NIHMS[116166]

Mycroft, R. H, Behrmann, M. and Kay, J. M. (2009). Visuoperceptual impairments underly letter-by-letter reading. Neuropsychologia, 47, 1733-1744.

Assistants to Dr. Behrmann:

Lauren Lorenzi,  llorenzi@andrew.cmu.edu

Postdoctoral Associates:

Mayu Nishimura,  mayu@cmu.edu
Adam Greenberg,  agreenb@cmu.edu
Adrian Nestor,  anestor@andrew.cmu.edu
Ilan Dinstein,   dinstein@nyu.edu

Current Graduate Students:

Linda Moya,  lhmoya@andrew.cmu.edu
Valentinos Zachariou,  vzachari@cmu.edu
Eva Dundas,  edundas@andrew.cmu.edu

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Related Links:

Curriculum Vitae (MS Word)

Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

Ethical issues in human experimentation (PowerPoint)

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