The goals of our laboratory’s research are to understand how the brain constructs representations of the environment and how these representations are modified by cognitive processes such as attention, expectation, and learning. We address these questions by applying a combination of behavioral, brain imaging, computational modeling, and pharmacological techniques to the study of healthy human participants as well as patients who suffer from diseases that affect perceptual processing.
Specifically, we are investigating the neurophysiological and neurochemical substrates of visual attention and perceptual learning, the effects of acetylcholine on perception, memory, and neural representations of the environment, inhibitory visual processing in schizophrenia and amblyopia, binocular rivalry, computational modeling of motion perception, functional subdivisions of the lateral geniculate nucleus, and representations of visual space.
Our laboratory is also developing protocols to administer psilocybin to human subjects to characterize the neural substrates of the acute psychedelic experience, the effects of psychedelics on visual feature representations in the brain, and the enduring transformative effects of the psychedelic experience on cognitive function and associated brain activity as well as emotion, stress reactivity, and immune system function.