A fundamental goal in neuroscience is to understand the link between the activity of neurons in the brain and perception. Object recognition is an important aspect of visual perception: Humans are readily able to rapidly recognize objects independent of variations in object size, position, illumination and pose. While a large body of work suggests that the inferotemporal cortex (IT) is involved in object recognition, many questions remain about the neuronal mechanisms that underlie object representations in the brain and how attention is directed to these representations. The proposed research will study these important questions by capitalizing on a unique opportunity to obtain neurophysiological recordings directly from human brain in awake, behaving patients. The PI will simultaneously record the electrophysiological activity in human IT and subjects' perceptual performance during a range of object recognition tasks that are designed to measure three important aspects of object recognition: invariance, attention, and reliability. These studies will be carried by the PI, a neurosurgeon with a clinical background in brain mapping and epilepsy surgery, under the primary mentorship of a senior neuroscientist with a primary interest in the neurophysiology of visual processing, and with additional mentoring from the Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery, who has extensive experience in basic and clinical neurophysiology applied in the operating room, and a senior neuropsychologist with expertise in human psychophysics. By enhancing our understanding of how the brain creates behaviorally relevant representations of the visual world, this research may help some of the millions of Americans who suffer from cognitive deficits such as visual agnosia after stroke or head injury. The research program will be complemented by coursework in neurophysiology and neuropsychology and by oversight by an advisory committee of experienced Baylor faculty that includes two neuroscientists, a neuropsychologist, a neurosurgeon, and a clinical neurophysiologist. Together, the research and training components of this career development award will serve as the foundation for the Pl's long term goal of establishing an independent research program in human cognitive neurophysiology.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS)
Type
Clinical Investigator Award (CIA) (K08)
Project #
1K08NS045053-01A2
Application #
6824832
Study Section
NST-2 Subcommittee (NST)
Program Officer
Babcock, Debra J
Project Start
2004-09-01
Project End
2009-08-31
Budget Start
2004-09-01
Budget End
2005-08-31
Support Year
1
Fiscal Year
2004
Total Cost
$169,821
Indirect Cost
Name
Baylor College of Medicine
Department
Neurosurgery
Type
Schools of Medicine
DUNS #
051113330
City
Houston
State
TX
Country
United States
Zip Code
77030
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Murphey, Dona K; Yoshor, Daniel; Beauchamp, Michael S (2008) Perception matches selectivity in the human anterior color center. Curr Biol 18:216-20
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Yoshor, Daniel; Bosking, William H; Ghose, Geoffrey M et al. (2007) Receptive fields in human visual cortex mapped with surface electrodes. Cereb Cortex 17:2293-302