I will be joining GMU as an Assistant Professor in the Dept of Psychology and as a PI in NICKI at the Krasnow Institute of Advanced Studies. My research is concerned with understanding the mechanisms used by the human brain that allow us to recognize the movements of other people, such as how they walk or move their face or hands. Most of us would have had the experience of recognizing someone familiar to us purely on the basis of the way they walk – even if we can’t see their face. Accurately perceiving the movements of others is important for things as basic as navigating your way in a crowded street, to more complex situations such as recognizing friends from a distance, identifying threats from others, or picking up on the subtle, nonverbal cues that signal attraction.
Recognizing the movements of others is something that we do with ease, yet this type of motion is complex, has many degrees of freedom and thus poses a significant perceptual problem. My work is centered on how we solve this perceptual problem. Recently I have begun working on the idea that we use information about the configuration of the human body in order to place constraints on how we expect it might move – for example, we know that the upper arm must remain connected to the shoulder, and this limits its range of motion. It turns out that an area in the brain known to be critical for recognizing human movement, called the superior temporal sulcus (STS), uses this kind of body-shape information. This is a relatively simple idea that is borrowed from computer vision approaches to recognizing human movement, but gives us some clues to the way the human brain processes this complex motion. It also shows how ideas from computer vision can inform the understanding of human vision, and vice versa, something I plan to pursue further…
To investigate these issues I use a number of brain imaging methods, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). fMRI measures changes to a magnetic field due to increases or decreases in blood oxygenation that are coupled to neuronal firing, and thus fMRI provides a way of non-invasively measuring brain function at high (2-5mm) spatial resolution. EEG is a measure of brain electrical activity recorded from the scalp, and gives millisecond accuracy of the timing of neural events.
I was born in Melbourne, Australia and completed my PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Brain Sciences Institute at Swinburne University in Melbourne, focusing on the neurochemical basis of attention and short-term memory in humans. Following this I completed a post-doc at the Center for Advanced Imaging in the Department of Radiology at West Virginia University in Morgantown, WV. Here I conducted a number studies using fMRI and EEG to examine the neural basis of the recognition of human movement, as well as learning a number of methodological issues associated with MRI. My research focus here was on how we visually represent the movement of different body parts, such as faces, arms, and legs. This work showed that when we see the movements of other people we activate our own motor representations in a manner consistent with the body part we see moving – that is, seeing another’s hand move activates representations of our own hand movements. This is another idea I will pursue in my research endeavors.
It is an exciting time to be starting a lab at GMU and at the Krasnow especially. It is my goal to set up a research program that is multidisciplinary, integrating knowledge about human vision, neuroscience, and computer vision and modeling to understand how we see others and interact with them.
Discoverers and Discoveries 