Cognitive Neuroscience
Research programs in the broad domain of cognitive neuroscience offer students in the department an opportunity to stress neurobiological approaches to cognition in their research, while developing a perspective strongly shaped by the department's emphasis on combining behavioral, computational, and neural investigations. Faculty in this area seek to understand complex cognitive processes in terms of their underlying neural mechanisms. Their investigations employ a variety of complementary tools to understand the neural bases of visual perception, sensory integration and motor planning, language acquisition, and learning and memory. Behavioral and psychophysical studies identify the tasks and functions performed by the brain during cognition. Brain-imaging (fMRI) studies identify regions of the brain engaged in cognitive processes, and neurobiological studies explore how their cellular and molecular properties relate to behavioral measures of cognition.
Skip to: Brain Imaging | Systems, Molecular, and Cellular Neuroscience
Brain Imaging
Primary Faculty
 Experience and the development of perceptual-motor systems |
 Early visual and linguistic experience and cortical organization |
 Cortical development & evolution of categories, especially numbers |
 The representation of concepts and categories |
 Acquisition of languages; spoken and signed creolization |
 Population coding; spatial representation in vision |
 Structure, emergence, and creolization of sign languages |
 fMRI and TMS investigations of visual perception |
 Language processing, word recognition |
*Not accepting graduate students
Secondary Faculty
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 Improving vision after damage—perceptual learning and physiological optics |
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Systems, Molecular, and Cellular Neuroscience
Primary Faculty
 Neural mechanisms of depth and motion perception |
 Neural basis of decision-making |
 Functional organization of visual pathways; Mechanisms of color vision |
 Neurobiology of vocal learning and plasticity |
 Neural mechanisms of early learning |
*Not accepting graduate students
Secondary Faculty
 Neural processing of motion, spatial orientation |
 Basal ganglia and degenerative diseases |
 Organization of visual cortex in humans and non-human primates |
 Processing of complex acoustic signals in the central auditory system |
 Vestibular, multisensory, and adaptive control of spatial orientation and balance |
 Perception of motion and MT |
 Neural control of individuated finger movements |