Research Projects

Seeing is deceptively simple for us, but it is so challenging that we have made computers play chess but still cannot make them see. It is hard because the same image can be produced by many objects and the same object can produce many images. It is widely believed that the brain resolves these ambiguities by incorporating knowledge about the world, but the nature of this knowledge is unknown. The goal of this proposal is to identify specific forms of visual object knowledge and understand their neural underpinnings. A unique strength of this project is our ability to study this problem using a variety of experimental techniques from behavior, brain imaging & perturbations in humans to single neuron recordings in monkeys and to use these data to build computational models.