ARNI Distinguished Seminar Series: Marlene Berhmann

About Dr. Marlene Berhmann:
Marlene Behrmann joined the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, where she holds the John and Clelia Sheppard Chair, in 2022. She also
holds the position of Emeritus Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Behrmann’s research is concerned with the psychological and neural bases of visual processing, with specific attention to the mechanisms by which the signals from the eye are transformed into meaningful percepts by the brain. She adopts an interdisciplinary approach combining computational,
neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies with adults and children in health and disease. Examples of her recent studies include investigations of the cortical visual system in paediatric
patients following hemispherectomy and identifying mechanisms of plasticity and elucidating the potential for cortical reorganization, but she has also studied visual cortical function in individuals with inherited retinal dystrophy. Dr. Behrmann was elected a member of the Society for Experimental Psychologists in 2008, and was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 2015, and into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. Dr Behrmann has received many awards including the Presidential Early Career Award for Engineering and Science, the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions and the Fred Kavli Distinguished Career Contributions in Cognitive Neuroscience Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.

Title: The development, hemispheric organization, and plasticity of high-level vision

Abstract: 
Adults recognize complex visual inputs, such as faces and words, with remarkable speed, accuracy and ease, but a full understanding of these abilities is still lacking. Much prior research has favoured a binary separation of faces and words, with the right hemisphere specialized for the representation of faces, and the left hemisphere specialized for the representation of words. Close scrutiny of the data, however, suggest a more graded and distributed hemispheric organization, as well as differing hemispheric profiles across individuals. Combining detailed behavioral data with structural and functional imaging data reveals how the distribution of function both within and between the two cerebral hemispheres emerges over the course of development, and a computational account of this mature organization is offered and tested. Provocatively, this mature profile is more malleable than previously thought, and cross-sectional and longitudinal data acquired from individuals with hemispherectomy reveal how a single hemisphere can subserve both visual classes. Together, the findings support a view of cortical visual organization (and perhaps, the organization of other functions too) as plastic and dynamic, both within and between hemispheres.

Location: Zuckerman Institute, Kavli Auditorium 9th Floor (for access to Zuckerman Institute, please email Lena Mei @ lm3440@columbia.edu 24 hours prior to the event)

Zoom link: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/96156119664?pwd=PCGPe1UbEzzbIvGnbAdVa8wX5wH9J0.1