We have a remarkable ability to learn from our experiences. Through experience, we learn to interpret 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 actions. 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 especially useful for investigating how visual representations are transformed through learning. Previously, we compared frontal, temporal and parietal areas during visual categorization, and found that parietal and frontal lobe neurons reflected the 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.

We are always looking for talented and enthusiastic new lab members, including postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, research technicians and undergraduates. Interested candidates are encouraged to contact us directly. Prospective graduate students are encouraged to apply to the Ph.D. programs in Neurobiology and/or Computational Neuroscience (link below).

Graduate training in Neuroscience at The University of Chicago