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Nicole Rust

Assistant Professor
Department: 
Psychology
Education: 
BS in Molecular Biology and Chemistry, University of Idaho; Ph.D. in Neural Science, New York University
Address: 
3401 Walnut St., Room 317C
Phone: 
215-898-4587
Email: 
nrust@sas.upenn.edu

Lab Page

Research Themes: 
Behavioral Neuroscience
Computational Modeling
Sensation and Perception
Specific Research Areas: 
Neural basis of object recognition
Research Synopsis: 

Our group is interested in the visual process­ing that happens at the nex­us of visual percep­tion and cog­nition. We are focused on understand­ing the seq­uence of neural events that allows the visual sys­tem to ext­ract informa­tion about the con­tent of the world (i.e. specific ob­jects) from the light patterns encoded by the eye. We are partic­ular­ly interested in the role that mem­ory plays in visual process­ing and ob­ject recog­nition. For example, when you search for a partic­ular face in a crowd, you have to com­pare the mem­ory of the face you are look­ing for with each per­son you see. We are current­ly investigat­ing the neural representa­tions of visual mem­ory and the neural mechan­isms that all­ow you to determ­ine if what you are look­ing "at" is also what you are look­ing "for". To add­ress these quest­ions, we monitor patterns of activ­ity in popula­tions of neur­ons in differ­ent brain areas while sub­jects perform ob­ject recog­nition tasks and use computation­al da­ta analyses to deci­pher the neural code.

 

Dr. Rust will be accepting new graduate students for admission in fall 2012.

 

Appointments: 

Psychology Graduate Group; Neuroscience Graduate Group

Advisees: 
  • Marino Pagan [Neuroscience Graduate Student]
Representative Publications: 

Rust NC, DiCarlo JJ (2010) Selectivity and tolerance ("invariance") both increase as visual information propagates from V4 to IT. Journal of Neuroscience 30:12978-12995.

Rust NC, Stocker AA (2010) Ambiguity and invariance: two fundamental challenges for visual processing. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 20:382-388.

Rust NC, Mante V, Simoncelli EP, Movshon JA (2006) How MT cells analyze the motion of visual patterns. Nature Neuroscience, 11:1421-1431. Supplementary material (stimulus)

Rust NC and Movshon JA (2005) In praise of artifice. Nature Neuroscience 8: 1647-1649

Rust NC, Schwartz O, Movshon JA, Simoncelli EP (2005) Spatiotemporal elements of macaque V1 receptive fields. Neuron 46: 945-956.