Nominator's project description
| Three-dimensional vision is one of the most remarkable human abilities. Being the basis of our understanding of the world of objects, it has aroused the curiosity of biologists and philosophers for hundreds of years. Nevertheless, little is known about how precisely our visual system achieves it and which parts of the brain are involved. The goal of Doris Tsao's project is to understand the mechanism for 3D vision in terms of the electrical activity of individual nerve cells in the visual cortex. One powerful technique she will use to examine the regions of the brain actively involved in 3D vision is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). She plans to perform fMRI in both humans and macaque monkeys, to gain insight into the essential principles of cortical organization underlying 3D vision, common to all primates. The pioneering work done by Doris Tsao in developing fMRI techniques to understand the organization of the brain is relevant to other fields of neurology and is already attracting growing interest. |
