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People/Faculty
Nancy Kanwisher, Ph.D.
Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Building: 46-4133
Lab: Kanwisher Lab
Email: ngk@mit.edu

Recognizing objects in a complex visual image is so computationally taxing that even the best current computer vision programs do this task poorly at best. Yet we perform this small miracle with high accuracy and no apparent effort every time we cast our eyes on a new scene. Work in my lab investigates the cognitive and neural basis of face and object recognition in humans, as well as other related mysteries in visual cognition.

Over the last ten years we have used fMRI to characterize a number of functionally distinct regions of human visual cortex, including the "fusiform face area" or FFA, which responds strongly and selectively when people view images of faces, the "parahippocampal place area" (PPA), which responds selectively to images of places, and the "extrastriate body area" (EBA), which responds selectively when subjects view images of human bodies or body parts. The selective responses of these regions are robust enough that each of them can be found, in the same approximate anatomical location, in virtually every normal subject scanned with fMRI. Thus, the FFA, PPA, and EBA are part of the basic functional architecture of human extrastriate cortex.

Ongoing work in our lab focuses on these and related regions to address the following questions:

•  What is the nature of the representations we extract from a brief glimpse of a person, place, or thing?

•  How "domain specific" are each of these regions? That is, to what extent does each region process and provide information about only its preferred class of stimuli?

•  How distinct are their borders (not just functionally, but anatomically)?

•  How do these regions arise in development?

•  How do their responses change with experience?

We also work in other areas of human cognition, understanding number, and language. Finally, we are working on reorganization of retinotopic cortex that results from visual deprivation, and its perceptual consequences.

The methods used in my lab include fMRI scanning (of undergraduates, children, and monkeys), behavioral measures, testing of neuropsychological patients, and magnetoencephalography-- whatever it takes to answer the question at hand.

These articles can be downloaded from my labwebsite: http://web.mit.edu/bcs/nklab/publications.shtml

Schwarzlose, R. F., Swisher, J.D., Dang, S., Kanwisher, N. (in press). The distribution of category and location information across object-selective regions of visual cortex. PNAS.

Baker, C., Liu, J., Wald, L., Kwong, K., Benner, T., Kanwisher, N.
(2007) Visual word processing and experimental origins of functional selectivity in human extrastriate cortex. PNAS. 104(21): 9087-9092

Williams, M., Dang, S., Kanwisher, N. (2007) Only some spatial patterns of fMRI response are read out in task performance. Nature Neuroscience.

Haushofer, J., Kanwisher, N. (2007) In the Eye of the Beholder:
Visual Experience and Categories in the Human Brain. Neuron. 53(6):
773-775



Other Publications
Research Figures