Research Overview
The focus of my research is understanding how the brain represents visual information. The natural scenes that we view every day are rich in content: they contain complex forms, textures, colors, and objects. There are two key mysteries: what is the structure of these natural images? and what computations does the brain perform to represent this structure?
We attack these problems using a range of methodologies. We use behavioral psychophysics to understand how humans perceive objects, and why object perception fails when objects are surrounded by clutter, in a phenomenon known as crowding. We use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to link specific patterns of brain activity to object perception and texture processing. Some of this work incorporates novel analysis techniques from machine learning. We also use fMRI to uncover the functional organization of visual cortex. And we use computational modeling to build biologically-inspired mathematical descriptions of image representation and develop formal models of visual perception.