Contributors

Contributor Biography

Jonathan Winawer is an assistant professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University. His research centers on visual science, including perception and visual encoding in the human nervous system. His laboratory seeks to understand the computations and circuits supporting visual perception in healthy human beings, and how deficiencies in these circuits contribute to disease. The laboratory has studied the organization of visual field maps in the human brain, has developed computational models that predict cortical responses across many parts of the visual system to a wide array of visual stimuli, and has measured brain and behavior in patients with visual deficits. Through a combination of modeling and empirical measurement, the lab has advanced understanding of how visual representations are transformed across different visual areas. The lab has also developed normative models and compared these to measurements of patients with visual deficits. Nathan Witthoft is broadly interested in studying the relationship between memory and perception using methods from behavioral psychology to neuroscience. One approach is to try to understand if and how the past influences current visual experience. Some of the things Previous work (in collaboraton with many others) has been on face adaptation, the role of language in color perception, top down perceptual reorganization in children, unsupervised learning of novel shape dimensions, and the role of learning in synesthesia. A second strand of his work, if and to what degree, our thoughts and memories make use of, or are instantiated by perceptual mechanisms. His work on synesthesia is most directly relevant to this question. Finally, he also works on recognition. How is it that we connect some visual experience to a name? The main work he is doing in this area is studying congenital prosopagnosia using behavior and neuroimaging.