We are a young research group in the Institute for Brain Research at the University of Bremen that uses fMRI and electrophysiology in macaque monkeys to understand visual perception.

Here is a little bit of background: I first became interested in neuroscience because I was fascinated by stereopsis, by the possibility of finding a 3D geometric engine in the brain responsible for creating our perception of space. This metaphor continues to guide my approach to understanding vision: I think it is critical for visual systems neuroscience to go beyond a piecemeal search for neural correlates, to systematically identify the entire network of areas involved in a perceptual process, and then understand what is being computed by single neurons within each area. My solution to this challenge has been to combine fMRI and single-unit recording in macaque monkeys. FMRI gives a global perspective of activity across the entire brain, revealing all the activated areas, while targeted single-unit recordings allow one to understand the function of each area in terms of spiking patterns of single neurons. I used this combined approach first in studying stereopsis, and more recently to explore face processing. The fMRI stage of both of these studies revealed a surprisingly clear, discretely localized network of areas which had not been predicted by previous “blind” single-unit recordings in the macaque brain. The goal of my lab in the next years is to understand what is being computed by single neurons within each of these two networks. This will make it possible to gain a real understanding of two fundamental problems in vision: how are objects identified, and how is the physical world reconstructed in 3D?

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