Diane Beck to deliver December 5 Frontiers lecture

Diane BeckThe MBM Program continues its Frontiers in Miniature Brain Machinery lecture series December 5 at 4pm in 2269 Beckman with Dr. Diane Beck. The lecture will be titled “The Importance of Prior Knowledge for Vision.”

Abstract: Human beings are surprisingly adept at extracting the gist from natural scenes, even with extremely brief exposures. How does the brain so quickly categorize such complex and cluttered stimuli? We use behavioral, ERP, and multi-voxel fMRI techniques to better understand the representation of natural scenes and objects in the brain. In particular we are interested in the role that knowledge and experience plays in shaping visual representations.

Diane Beck is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and affiliated with Beckman Institute. She earned her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.  She specializes in the areas of cognitive neuroscience, attention, and visual perception, examining the cognitive processes and neural structures that affect the way we visually understand the world around us. Her research team studies these processes with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), behavioral methods, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and other methodological approaches.

Learn more about Beck’s work with the Attention and Perception Lab at Illinois.

Dr. Beck’s Faculty Profile >

The Attention and Perception Lab >