We are adept at recognizing faces, reading other’s intentions, and identifying critical objects for survival. My research goal is to understand how the brain process these socially relevant visual stimuli. Primates have a network of discrete visual areas in the ventral stream specialized in processing faces and objects.

My research focuses on the neural mechanisms of the ventral stream:

 

What kind of computations and transformations of retinal inputs are carried out?

What are the organizational principles?

How does the neuronal activity across ventral stream as a whole contribute to perception?

 

The marmoset, a New World monkey possessing a well-developed visual cortex, is a promising animal model because of its flat cortex and transgenic potential. In the past two years, I have established the feasibility of doing electrophysiological recordings and fMRI imaging in awake, behaving marmosets. Moreover, my recently published work showed that marmosets have a complex face patch system, with spatial organization resembling that of macaques and humans.

 

I plan to extend this work to examine how responses in face patches, as well as a measure of perception, are affected by systemic manipulation of neuronal activity of other areas by combining targeted optogenetic silencing with electrophysiological and optical recordings of the ventral pathway.