Nicole Rust

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.