Research Topics
The aim of the Unit on Learning and Plasticity is to better understand how the structure, function and selectivity of the cortex change with experience or impairment, even in adulthood. Toward this goal, there are three main avenues of research, principally using brain-imaging techniques. The first avenue concerns the nature of perceptual representations in the human brain, focusing on complex visual stimuli such as faces, bodies, scenes and words. The second avenue explores how experience and learning change the neural and cognitive representations of sensory input. For example, what are the neural changes underlying our enormous capacity to learn to recognize new objects and to make fine-grained discriminations among those objects? The third avenue concerns how the cortex adapts following damage to the nervous system (either peripheral or central). For example, what is the impact of macular degeneration (loss of foveal vision) or amputation on cortical function and how does that relate to conditions such as phantom limb pain (pain in the missing limb)? Elucidating the nature and extent of cortical plasticity is critical for understanding brain function throughout life.