[lingtalks] Ayse Saygin Talk, Friday Feb. 22 at 12pm

[Steven Ford]

The UCSD Department of Cognitive Science is pleased to announce a talk by

Ayse Saygin Ph.D.

Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Wellcome Trust Centre for
Neuroimaging, University College London


Friday, February 22, 2008 at 12pm
Cognitive Science Building, room 003


"Brain Networks for High Level Visual Perception: Neuropsychological and 
Neuroimaging Studies"

How does the brain process meaningful, biologically relevant stimuli?  My 
research addresses this question using multiple, complementary methods and 
subject populations, and a wide range of stimuli. Here, I will focus 
specifically on visual perception. First, I will present experiments where 
we explored brain areas that subserve the perception of point-light 
biological motion. These stimuli consist of only a handful of moving 
points, yet lead to a vivid percept of a body carrying out recognizable 
actions. Neuroimaging allowed us to identify a network of brain areas that 
are involved in processing these stimuli, while lesion analyses of 
brain-injured patients corroborated these findings by identifying the same 
network as necessary for intact functioning of the system. Second, using 
fMRI, we studied retinotopic maps in the human brain and explored their 
functional properties.  While retinotopy is a fundamental property of early 
visual areas, there are also well-defined retinotopic maps in areas that 
are not traditionally thought to be visual. Furthermore, these maps are 
actively used in processes such as directing and maintaining attention, as 
well as for representing unattended salient stimuli.  Overall, this 
research provides substantial evidence that even in "passive" perceptual 
situations, the brain draws upon sensory, attentional and motor networks to 
make sense of complex, meaningful, biologically significant stimuli.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://pidgin.ucsd.edu/pipermail/lingtalks/attachments/20080220/4482a08a/attachment.htm