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Experience-dependent plasticity as revealed by fMRI| old_uid | 1222 |
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| title | Experience-dependent plasticity as revealed by fMRI |
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| start_date | 2006/05/15 |
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| schedule | 17h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Detecting and recognising meaningful objects in the complex environments we inhabit is a critical skill for survival and social interactions that underlies a range of behaviours, from identifying predators or prey, to diagnosing tumours on medical images and finding familiar faces in the crowd.
In humans, these processes operate quickly, automatically, and they far surpass the abilities of current artificial vision systems. Simple as these skills may appear and taken for granted by most, the processes involved invisual recognition are far from trivial for the visual system, as objects are usually camouflaged in complex scenes and undergo image changes (e.g. position, orientation) that produce profound changes in the visual input.
At the core of understanding the neural substrates of visual recognition are fundamental questions about the role of visual experience and development in the establishment of the neuronal representations that support complex object perception. The goal of our research is to investigate the experience-dependent and developmental plasticity mechanisms that mediate visual recognition in the human and monkey visual cortex.
Our human fMRI studies provide evidence for distributed plasticity mechanisms across visual areas that mediate global shape detection in cluttered scenes. Further, our longitudinal monkey fMRI studies show that fMRI can usefully be employed to address whether the plasticity mechanisms underlying learning in the adult brain are the same as those mediating life-long functional development.
1. Kourtzi Z, DiCarlo JJ (2006) Learning and neural plasticity in visual object recognition. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 16, 152-8.
2. Kourtzi Z, Betts LR, Sarkheil P, Welchman AE (2005) Distributed Neural Plasticity for Shape Learning in the Human Visual Cortex. PLOS Biology, 3, e204.
3. Kourtzi Z, Augath M, Logothetis NK, Movshon JA, Kiorpes L (2006). Development of visually-evoked cortical activity in infant macaque monkeys studied longitudinally with fMRI. Magentic Resonance Imaging, 24, 359-66. |
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| responsibles | NC |
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