People
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Daniel D. Dilks (dilks at mit dot edu) As a Postdoctoral fellow in the Kanwisher lab, I am using behavioral and fMRI data to investigate the occurrence, causes, and perceptual consequences of cortical reorganization in the human adult visual system. I received my Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University where, under the tutelage of Michael McCloskey and Barbara Landau, I studied cortical plasticity, as well as visual-spatial representation in individuals with acquired brain damage, and children and adults with a genetic disorder (i.e., Williams syndrome). |
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Karla Evans (kevans at mit dot edu) I received my Ph.D. at Princeton University where, under the tutelage of Anne Treisman, I studied natural scene perception and the role of attention in processing complex visual stimuli, as well as crossmodal interaction between correspondent auditory and visual features. For my thesis I used psychophysics, fMRI, and electrophysiology in humans to understand featural correspondence between basic auditory and visual features, exploring the nature, the neural correlates and the role of attention in their interaction. As a post-doc in the Kanwisher lab I am further honing my fMRI skills as I now try to understand how face processing changes, both behaviorally and neurally through development. |
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Evelina Fedorenko (evelina9 at mit dot edu) I am interested in the question of the extent of domain-specificity in the mind and brain with regard to language and other cognitive systems. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Kanwisher lab, I use functional MRI to investigate the extent of domain-specificity, as well as the internal functional organization, of language and music in the human brain. I am also pursuing a number of related projects, in collaboration with the Gabrieli lab, the Gibson lab and the Saxe lab (see my website for more details on my past and current research.). |
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Johannes Haushofer (joha at mit dot edu) I'm a Neuroscience PhD student at Harvard. My interests are in mid-level shape perception and object recognition, as well as economic decision-making, in particular intertemporal choice. Before coming to Boston, I got a BA in Psychology, Physiology, and Philosophy at Oxford. |
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Nancy Kanwisher (ngk at mit dot edu) Lucky me! I get to work with all the brilliant and wonderful people on this page, and to think about cool questions like these: How are objects, faces, and scenes represented in the brain, and (how) do the representations of each of these classes of stimuli differ from each other? How are visual representations affected by attention, awareness, and experience? Which mental processes get their own special patch of cortex, why is it these processes and (apparenly) not others, and how do special-purpose bits of brain arise in the first place? |
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Becca Schwarzlose (beccafs at mit dot edu) Before joining the Kanwisher Lab as a graduate student, I received my bachelors degree in Psychology and Linguistics at Northwestern University and then conducted research in the lab of Dr. Ann Graybiel, also here at MIT. Given my poor track record at recognizing faces, I may be an unlikely investigator of face (and body) perception in humans. However at present I study functional selectivity for images of faces and bodies in the ventral visual pathway using fMRI techniques. My long-term interests center around the application of these imaging techniques to the study of mental illness. |
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Won Mok Shim (wshim at mit dot edu) I received my PhD at Harvard University where, under the guidance of Patrick Cavanagh, I studied the effect of attention, motion, and eye movement on position encoding. Through my PhD work using psychophysics, I showed that attention is a key mechanism underlying distortion of position representations. Then, I was a post-doc in the lab of Yuhong Jiang, where I used cognitive neuroscience tools to investigate neural correlates of capacity limit in visual attention and working memory. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Kanwisher lab, I am using behavioral and fMRI techniques to investigate how "where" and "what" information are represented in visual working memory examining higher-order visual areas in dorsal and ventral streams as well as early visual areas. |
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Ed Vul (evul at mit dot edu) I'm a first-year graduate student; eager to employ my training in psychophysics and cognitive psychology from Don MacLeod and Hal Pashler in a more brain-savvy study of vision. Right now, I am particularly interested in how people encode high-level dimensions of visual entities: in other words, what mechanisms and rules determine how brains learn to see? |
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Jason Webster (jwebst at mit dot edu) |