Marlene Behrmann, PhD

  • Professor, Ophthalmology

Phone

412-337-1398

E-mail

mbehrmann@pitt.edu

Personal Website

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3814-1015

Education & Training

PhD, University of Toronto, 1991

Campus Address

Room 715 Eye and Ear Institute
Lothrop Street
Pittsburgh 15213

One-Line Research Description

Behrmann’s research is concerned with characterizing the computations of the human cortical visual system

Despite the fact that visual scenes may contain multiple objects and people, humans can recognize the objects and individuals with ease and accuracy. Research in my lab focuses on studying how this is achieved - what are the necessary psychological processes and representations that underlie abilities such as object segmentation and recognition, face recognition, mental imagery, reading and writing and spatial attention? The major approach used to address these questions is to study the behavior of human adults and children in health and in disease, with the latter including individuals whose brains have been altered by stroke, head injury or surgical resection, which selectively affects their ability to carry out these visual processes. By examining brain-behavior correspondences using neuroimaging (EEG, fMRI, sEEG) and detailed psychophysics measures, we can shed light on the functional and structural organization of the brain and come to understand the biological substrate of high-level vision.                                 

Representative Publications

Ayzenberg, V. and Behrmann, M.  (2022). Does the ventral visual pathway compute shape? TiCS, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.09.019

Granovetter, M.C., Ettensohn, L., Robert, S and Behrmann, M. (2022). With Childhood Hemispherectomy, One Hemisphere Can Support--But is Suboptimal for--Word and Face Recognition, PNAS, 119(44):e2212936119. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2212936119. https://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.11.06.371823v1

Liu, N., Behrmann, M., Turchi, J. N., Avidan, G., Hadj-Bouziane, F. and Ungerleider, L. (2022). Hierarchical organization of face patches in macaque cortex as revealed by fMRI and pharmacological inactivation, Nature Communication, 13(1):6787. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-34451-x.

Behrmann, M. and Avidan, G. (2022). Face perception: Computational insights from phylogeny, Trends in Cognitive Science, 26(4):350-363. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.01.006

Blauch, N. M., Behrmann, M. and Plaut, D. C. (2022). A connectivity-constrained computational account of topographic organization in high-level visual cortex, PNAS, 119(3):e2112566119. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2112566119

Chaman Zar, A., Behrmann, M. and Grover, P. (2021). Neural silences can be localized rapidly using noninvasive scalp EEG, Nature Communications Biology, 4, 429. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-01768-0