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James DiCarlo studies the patterns of brain activity that underlie our remarkable ability to easily recognize visual objects. Barring unfortunate injury or illness, we all take this fundamental visual ability for granted, yet it is an extremely difficult and important unsolved problem. The goal of his lab is to uncover the mechanisms used by the brain in its seemingly effortless ability to solve this problem. To do this he records the electrical activity of neurons in brain regions that give us the ability to perceive objects in the world as having permanence, even though their image on the retinal surface are constantly changing -- for example, due to changes in object position, distance, pose, lighting and background. These experimental data constrain computational hypotheses about how the problem might be solved, and he seeks to use this understanding to inspire artificial vision systems, to aid in the development of visual prosthetics, and to obtain deep insight into how the brain represents sensory information in a way that is highly suited for cognition and action. His research is currently focused on understanding how these perceptual abilities may be developed through learning and experience.
DiCarlo was named Investigator at the McGovern Institute and Assistant Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 2001. He received his Ph.D. and M.D. from Johns Hopkins University and did postdoctoral work at Baylor College of Medicine. In 1998, he received the Martin and Carol Macht Young Investigator Research Prize from Johns Hopkins University and in 2002 received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and the Pew Scholar Award in the Biomedical Sciences. In 2005 he received MIT's Surdna Research Foundation Award and its School of Science Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and in 2006 he received a McKnight Scholar Award in Neuroscience from the McKnight Foundation.
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