Title: Eccentricity and the Development of the Human Ventral Visual Stream
Why do clustered and distributed representations of visual categories in human ventral temporal cortex (VTC) have a consistent cortical topography across people?
Here, I will describe two recent studies from my lab that address this important question. Using fMRI in combination with population receptive field (pRF) modeling and eye tracking in children and adults, we discovered that viewing behavioral during childhood plays a key role in shaping representations to learned categories such as faces, words, and even invented categories such as Pokémon. Strikingly, we found that fixation patterns on these stimuli during childhood play a major role in shaping not only the properties of pRFs in VTC, but also where regions that process these stimuli develop in VTC. Together these findings suggest that inherent eccentricity representations in early childhood combined with consistent viewing behavior during childhood result in a shared functional topography in adulthood.
Kalanit Grill-Spector is a Professor in Psychology and the Stanford Neurosciences Institute. Her research examines how the brain processes visual information and perceives it. She uses functional imaging techniques to visualize the living brain in action and understand how it functions to recognize people, objects and places. Additionally, she investigates how the anatomical and functional properties of the brain change from infancy to childhood through adulthood, and how this development is related to improved visual recognition abilities.
She received her PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and was a postdoctoral fellow in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT before joining Stanford University. She has received several awards and honors including the Human Sciences Frontier Fellowship, the Sloan Fellowship, and the Klingenstein Fellowship in Neuroscience. She has served as an Editor for the Journal of Vision and Neuropsychologia. Presently, she has an active and diverse laboratory at the Psychology Department at Stanford University, she is a leader on the Wu Tsai Big idea project on Neurodevelopment, a board member of the Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging at Stanford University, and is the director of the graduate studies in the Department of Psychology.
Free and open to the public.
Sponsored by the Cognitive Science Program
