Many McGovern Institute faculty members study how the brain processes the information that enters the senses, and how these perceptual processes may be impaired following trauma or disease. This research is uncovering basic principles of perceptual analyses that are fundamental for many practical applications, including neural prostheses for people suffering from blindness or paralysis.

Once perceptual stimuli enter our brain, what does our brain do with them? Barring unfortunate injury of illness, we all take the fundamental ability to perceive the world for granted; yet it is an extremely difficult and important unsolved problem. James DiCarlo studies the patterns of brain activity that underlie our remarkable ability to easily recognize visual objects and to represent that sensory information in a way that is highly suited for cognition and action. He records the electrical activity of neurons to in brain regions that enable us to perceive objects in the world as having permanence, even though their image on the retinal surface are constantly changing. His experimental data will guide the development of artificial vision systems and visual prosthetics. His research is currently focused on understanding how these perceptual abilities may be developed through learning and experience.

Tomaso Poggio is interested in understanding how the brain learns to recognize and classify objects. His work has many theoretical and practical applications, including computer vision systems and man-machine interfaces. He and his collaborators, in labs here and elsewhere, are developing a quantitative model of the ventral stream in the visual cortex. The model is an effective tool to summarize experimental data, plan new experiments, and interpret them. Surprisingly, the model outperforms state-of-the-art computer vision systems in difficult recognition tasks and mimics human performance in rapid categorization of complex images.

Like many brain functions, object recognition relies on specially tuned neurons in distinct brain regions. Nancy Kanwisher studies visual recognition in humans using fMRI brain imaging technology to identify brain regions necessary for recognizing broad categories of objects. She has discovered very specialized circuits for recognizing objects of great importance to us as human beings, most notably faces, places, and body parts. She is investigating whether such specialized areas are "hard wired" from birth or develop as a child experiences the world. She is also studying how the brain may reorganize itself following damage to the retina, as in macular degeneration.

Human beings can recognize a car key not just visually, but also by the touch of a fingertip. Christopher Moore studies tactile perceptions, often using rats as a model. Instead of relying on vision, rats rely on tactile sensations from their whiskers to navigate the objects in their usually dark world. Moore has discovered that the rat cortex has an exquisite representational map based on its whiskers. This map allows rodents to decipher the whiskers' sensation to learn what they are encountering and where they are in their surroundings. He uses this system to explore how an impaired ability to process the continuous barrage of changing sensations relates to diseases like schizophrenia.

How do the complexities of the perceptual system emerge? Using the visual system as a model, Martha Constantine-Paton looks at the molecular, anatomical, and electrical changes in neural pathways during early development. She has observed changes taking place in individual neurons in the developing cortex during the first six hours after an animal is born, as it experiences the world for the first time. She hopes to understand how certain disorders that may appear later in life, like schizophrenia or ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease), may arise from connectivity problems in very early development.

What do we do with our sensory perceptions? How does the brain evaluate them, and use them for thoughts, decisions, or emotional reactions? The answer to those questions involves cognition.