Disclaimer: website is still under construction pls forgive buggy links~
The highly structured nature of the physical world has allowed our brain and peripheral nervous system to evolve neural machinery and learning mechanisms that exploit statistical regularities to do useful things, like using visual information to perform complex tasks, such as instantly recognizing objects, with high accuracy. We wouldn’t be able to learn to do this if the world were completely random. What can the functional organization of visual cortex tell us about the way our brain has evolved to achieve this impressive feat?
We know that there is great regularity in the object category related functional topography of the visual cortex of neurotypical adult brains. There is active debate in our field regarding the extent to which the brain is innately equipped with machinery to perform tasks such as object reocognition, especially for objects that are thought of as ‘special’ at birth such as faces, relative to its dependence on learning (through experience) the statistical regularities that are predictive of the object categories that are important to us. I think this debate is super fun. In my research, I use behavioral, neuroimaging, and artificial intelligence methods to understand visual object recognition and the neural and computational principles that drive the functional organization of visual cortex.
Hello, welcome to my page. My name is Sophie. I am a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, pursuing my PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience through the Psychology Department and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition.
I went to Williams College to study philosophy of cognitive science and the biology of genetic evolution and animal behavior. In my undergraduate research, I studied theoretical frameworks for relating structures in implementation level dynamics (e.g. neural, or individual organisms) to larger-scale phenomena. At the end of undergrad, I realized that my interests in theoretical cognitive science and philosophy of representations in science were highly compatible with empirical pursuits in cognitive neuroscience, so I applied to work in the Lab of Brain and Cognition at the NIH with Dr. Leslie Ungerleider in comparative visual cognitive neuroscience. It was at the NIH working with Dr. Xiaomin Yue and Dr. Maryam Vaziri-Pashkam on human and macaque research that I began to develop the specific interests that I mentioned above.