Our speaker will present a virtual seminar, via Zoom. All are welcome to join us in the SAIL Room for the Zoom seminar – pizza will be served as usual! Please bring your own beverage.

To join the seminar remotely, please email for link: pennmindcore@sas.upenn.edu

Dwight Kravitz
Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences
GWU

Closing the loop between human neurophysiology and behavior

A core goal of human cognitive neuroscience must be the use of physiological observation to clarify the mechanisms that shape behavior. At this point, we do not want for these observations, with a wealth of data from animal models and neuroimaging investigations in human providing a multimodal quantification of the response evoked by a wide variety of stimuli and task contexts. The consequences of these observations for our understanding of behavioral mechanism are less clear. Here, we explore those consequences through testing a novel set of behavioral predictions which arise from direct observations of the physiology. Across a series of studies, the behavioral implications of several aspects of neurophysiology will be explored: 1) the co-localization of function, (e.g., visual working memory and perceptual processing), 2) implicit learning in the context of distributed synaptic plasticity, and 3) attention and inhibition in integrated circuits. These results suggest that top-down processes directly and routinely recruit processing within perceptual areas, altering their patterns of connectivity and providing an explanation for the stereotypical pattern of selectivity seen for even recently created visual categories.