Lior Bugatus
Graduate Student

How does task affect visual representations across the brain?

Even the simplest of tasks in our day to day life requires an accurate representation of objects in the world. Further still, of the multiple objects in our immediate environment, only some might be relevant to the goals we are currently trying to achieve: finding our car in a parking lot, remembering how our hotel looks like, and so on. While the processing of visual objects in the human visual cortex is fairly well understood, it remains unknown how the visual information relevant to the task is transformed and made available to the executive regions of the brain. Using functional imaging (fMRI), my research focuses on how the performance of different cognitive tasks affects the processing of visual categories in different regions of the brain, and particularly how these categories are represented in the higher cognition regions of the prefrontal cortex across different tasks.

Read more about this research in our paper: Task alters category representations in prefrontal but not high-level visual cortex. Lior Bugatus, Kevin S. Weiner, Kalanit Grill-Spector. Neuroimage. 2017.