Event Location: NSH 1507
Bio: Dr. Behrmann is a professor in the Department of Psychology, Carnegie
Mellon University and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her research is concerned with the
psychological and neural bases of visual processing, with particular
focus on the way in which the signals from the eye are transformed into
meaningful and coherent percepts by the brain.

Abstract: Understanding the psychological and neural mechanisms that underlie face
recognition is of great importance not only because faces have
distinctive evolutionary and social significance but also because face
perception is probably the most developed visual perceptual skill in
humans. Among the questions to be examined in this project are what
underlying representations mediate the perception of highly confusable
faces and how familiar and unfamiliar faces are differentiated. At issue
too is whether face processing can be accomplished implicitly and what
neural correlates and eye movement trajectories support this implicit
processing. We also explore the distributed cortical circuitry that
supports face processing, including multiple regions of ventral
occipital cortex and the anterior temporal lobe, and their cooperative
structure and function, as well as the relationship of these structures
to frontal cortex. These questions are examined in the context of both
normal and impaired face processing, the latter among individuals who
suffer from prosopagnosia, and we contrast the acquired and congenital
forms of the disorder to explore whether breakdown recapitulates
acquisition. To address these questions, we adopt an integrative
approach, exploiting converging evidence from multiple methodologies
such as psychophysics, eye tracking, functional and structural magnetic
resonance imaging along with detailed innovative analytic methods. These
findings not only shed light on the psychological and neural mechanisms
mediating face processing but also have implications for visual
cognition, more generally. Moreover, the studies of impaired face
processing may have impact for other neurodevelopmental disorders and
may guide the development of intervention studies with better efficacy.