Nancy Kanwisher

Last updated
Nancy G. Kanwisher
Introduction to the Simons Center, Nancy Kanwisher, 2m33s.jpg
Born1958 (age 6566)
Nationality American
Alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Known for Fusiform face area
Awards Golden Brain Award
Heineken Prize
Scientific career
Fields Cognitive psychology
Institutions UCLA
Harvard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Thesis Repetition blindness: type recognition without token individuation  (1986)
Doctoral advisor Mary C. Potter
Doctoral students Frank Tong

Nancy Gail Kanwisher FBA (born 1958) [1] is the Walter A Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She studies the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying human visual perception and cognition. [2]

Contents

Academic background

Nancy Kanwisher received her BS in biology from MIT in 1980 and her PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT in 1986. After obtaining her PhD working with Mary C. Potter, she then did her post-doctoral work with Anne Treisman at UC-Berkeley. Before returning to MIT as a faculty member in 1997 in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Kanwisher served as a faculty member at both UCLA and Harvard University. [3]

Kanwisher is a member and associate editor for journals in areas of cognitive science, including Cognition, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, Journal of Neuroscience, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and Cognitive Neuropsychology. [4] She has also written on other subjects, including an article in the Huffington Post and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010 about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. [5]

Kanwisher once shaved her head while teaching a lecture on neuroanatomy to point out the functional regions of the brain so her students could visualize the concepts. [6]

Achievements and awards

Kanwisher has received several accolades for her academic endeavors.

She was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Troland Research Award in 1999, awarded for achievement in investigations regarding relationships of consciousness and the physical world. [4]

She received the MacVicar Faculty Fellow Award in 2002 [7] and the 2016 National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award. [8]

In January 2021, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from University of York, England. [9]

In 2002, she won the NAS Award in the Neurosciences.

In 2023, she won the Jean Nicod Prize. [10]

Kanwisher founded the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and is the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

She serves as a member of the National Academy of Sciences (since 2005), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 2009), [11] and received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in Peace and International Security (1986).

In July 2017, Kanwisher was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. [12]

Research

Kanwisher has training in cognitive psychology, which is investigating how the mind works by observing its outward behavior. She is credited with co-discovering and characterizing the fusiform face area (FFA) in the human brain, [13] [14] a region whose function appears to be the recognition of fine distinctions between well-known objects and, in particular, faces. She also co-discovered the parahippocampal place area (PPA), [15] a region of the brain that recognizes environmental scenes. These two discoveries are now widely discussed in the cognitive field and provide a gold standard for clarity in search for primitives of human cognition. [4] In her research, she uses functional MRI, [3] [16] behavioral methods, and transcranial magnetic stimulation. She also uses ECOG to study audition, language processing, and social perception. She gave a 2014 TED Talk entitled "A Neural Portrait of the Human Mind". [16]

Related Research Articles

Michael Tomasello is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as a linguist. He is professor of psychology at Duke University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">McGovern Institute for Brain Research</span> Research institute within Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The McGovern Institute for Brain Research is a research institute within MIT. Its mission is to understand how the brain works and to discover new ways to prevent or treat brain disorders. The institute was founded in 2000 by Patrick McGovern and Lore Harp McGovern with a gift to MIT that is expected to total $350M over 20 years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Frith</span> British neuroscientist

Christopher Donald Frith FRS, FMedSci, FBA, FAAAS is a British psychologist and professor emeritus at the Wellcome Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London. He is also an affiliated research worker at the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, an honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy and a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fusiform face area</span> Part of the human visual system that is specialized for facial recognition

The fusiform face area is a part of the human visual system that is specialized for facial recognition. It is located in the inferior temporal cortex (IT), in the fusiform gyrus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Earl K. Miller</span>

Earl Keith Miller is a cognitive neuroscientist whose research focuses on neural mechanisms of cognitive, or executive, control. Earl K. Miller is the Picower Professor of Neuroscience with the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the Chief Scientist and co-founder of SplitSage. He is a co-founder of Neuroblox.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ann Graybiel</span> American neuroscientist

Ann Martin Graybiel is an Institute Professor and a faculty member in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She is an expert on the basal ganglia and the neurophysiology of habit formation, implicit learning, and her work is relevant to Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, obsessive–compulsive disorder, substance abuse and other disorders that affect the basal ganglia.

Susan E. Carey is an American psychologist who is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. She studies language acquisition, children's development of concepts, conceptual changes over time, and the importance of executive functions. She has conducted experiments on infants, toddlers, adults, and non-human primates. Her books include Conceptual Change in Childhood (1985) and The Origin of Concepts (2009).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ursula Bellugi</span> American psychologist (1931–2022)

Ursula Bellugi was an American cognitive neuroscientist. She was a Distinguished Professor Emerita and director of the Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. She is known for research on the neurological bases of American Sign Language and language representation in people with Williams Syndrome.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Functional specialization (brain)</span> Neuroscientific theory that different regions of the brain are specialized for different functions

In neuroscience, functional specialization is a theory which suggests that different areas in the brain are specialized for different functions.

The Troland Research Awards are an annual prize given by the United States National Academy of Sciences to two researchers in recognition of psychological research on the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. The areas where these award funds are to be spent include but are not limited to areas of experimental psychology, the topics of sensation, perception, motivation, emotion, learning, memory, cognition, language, and action. The award preference is given to experimental work with a quantitative approach or experimental research seeking physiological explanations.

Rebecca Saxe is a professor of cognitive neuroscience and associate Dean of Science at MIT. She is an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and a board member of the Center for Open Science. She is known for her research on the neural basis of social cognition. She received her BA from Oxford University where she studied Psychology and Philosophy, and her PhD from MIT in Cognitive Science. She is the granddaughter of Canadian coroner and politician Morton Shulman.

Isabel Gauthier is a cognitive neuroscientist, and the David K. Wilson Professor of Psychology and head of the Object Perception Lab at Vanderbilt University’s Department of Psychology. In 2000, with the support of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, she founded the Perceptual Expertise Network (PEN), which now comprises over ten labs based across North America. In 2006 PEN became part of the NSF-funded Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center (TDLC).

Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian, is professor of clinical neuropsychology at the department of psychiatry and Medical Research Council (MRC)/Wellcome Trust Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, University of Cambridge. She is also an honorary clinical psychologist at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge. She has an international reputation in the fields of cognitive psychopharmacology, neuroethics, neuropsychology, neuropsychiatry and neuroimaging.

Justine Saade-Sergent was a researcher in the cognitive neuroscience field. From 1979 to 1982, she was an associate professor of neurology and neurosurgery at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University.

Laura E. Schulz is a professor of cognitive science at the brain and cognitive sciences department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the principal investigator of the Early Childhood Cognition Lab at MIT. Schulz is known for her work on the early childhood development of cognition, causal inference, discovery, and learning.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Doris Tsao</span> American neuroscientist

Doris Ying Tsao is an American systems neuroscientist and professor of biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She was formerly on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology. She is recognized for pioneering the use of fMRI with single-unit electrophysiological recordings and for discovering the macaque face patch system for face perception. She is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the director of the T&C Chen Center for Systems Neuroscience. She won a MacArthur "Genius" fellowship in 2018. Tsao was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.

Adriana Galván is an American psychologist and expert on adolescent brain development. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she directs the Developmental Neuroscience laboratory. She was appointed the Jeffrey Wenzel Term Chair in Behavioral Neuroscience and the Dean of Undergraduate Education at UCLA.

Thomas L. Griffiths is an Australian academic who is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness, and Culture at Princeton University. He studies human decision-making and its connection to problem-solving methods in computation. His book with Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, was named one of the "Best Books of 2016" by MIT Technology Review.

Nim Tottenham is a professor of psychology at Columbia University, where she leads the Developmental Affective Neuroscience Laboratory. Her research highlighted fundamental changes in amygdala-prefrontal cortex circuitry across childhood and adolescence and the influential role of early experiences on the developmental trajectories of these circuits.

Frank Tong is a cognitive neuroscientist and centennial professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University. He grew up in Toronto, Canada. Tong is recognized for his research on the neural bases of human visual perception, visual consciousness, attentional selection, face and object recognition, and visual working memory. In more recent work, he is developing deep neural network models of the human visual system.

References

  1. Sanders, Laura (April 27, 2015). "Brain on display: Nancy Kanwisher goes where few other neuroscientists dare to in public outreach". Science News . Archived from the original on January 16, 2021. Retrieved August 5, 2015. Kanwisher, 56
  2. "Nancy Kanwisher". McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. Archived from the original on 10 March 2010. Retrieved 13 November 2014.
  3. 1 2 "Q&A with Prof. Nancy Kanwisher '80 (CPW Preview!) | MIT Admissions". mitadmissions.org. 5 April 2010. Archived from the original on 2013-05-16. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  4. 1 2 3 Landau, Barbara. "Nancy Kanwisher". Cognitive Science Society. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  5. "Listening to Palestinians". The Huffington Post. 14 December 2010. Archived from the original on 2010-12-21. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  6. "This Badass Scientist Shaved Off Her Hair To Teach Students About Brain Regions". BuzzFeed. 16 April 2015. Archived from the original on 2015-04-18. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  7. "Brain and Mind". c250.columbia.edu. Archived from the original on 2016-03-12. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  8. "NIH Director's Pioneer Award Program - 2016 Pioneer Award Recipients | NIH Common Fund". commonfund.nih.gov. Archived from the original on 2016-11-08.
  9. "University of York honours three for their contribution to society". University of York. Archived from the original on 9 December 2020. Retrieved 11 December 2020.
  10. "The Prix Jean Nicod 2023 is awarded to Nancy Kanwisher (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)". École Normale Superior. November 28, 2023. October 18, 2023.
  11. "Eight from MIT elected to AAAS". MIT News. 20 April 2009. Archived from the original on 2016-03-05. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  12. "Elections to the British Academy celebrate the diversity of UK research". British Academy. 2 July 2017. Archived from the original on 23 July 2017. Retrieved 29 July 2017.
  13. Kanwisher, Nancy (1997-06-01). "The Fusiform Face Area: A Module in Human Extrastriate Cortex Specialized for Face Perception" (PDF). The Journal of Neuroscience. 17 (11): 4302–4311. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.17-11-04302.1997 . PMC   6573547 . PMID   9151747. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2015-10-14. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  14. Kanwisher, Nancy (2000). "Response Properties of the Human Fusiform Face Area" (PDF). Cognitive Neuropsychology. 17 (1–3): 257–280. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.208.2920 . doi:10.1080/026432900380607. PMID   20945183. S2CID   4831248. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2020-08-04. Retrieved 2014-11-13.
  15. Epstein, Russell; Kanwisher, Nancy (April 1998). "A cortical representation of the local visual environment". Nature. 392 (6676): 598–601. Bibcode:1998Natur.392..598E. doi:10.1038/33402. ISSN   1476-4687. PMID   9560155. S2CID   920141. Archived from the original on 2020-08-21. Retrieved 2020-12-01.
  16. 1 2 "The brain is a Swiss Army knife: Nancy Kanwisher at TED2014". TED Blog. 19 March 2014. Archived from the original on 2015-12-22. Retrieved 2015-11-11.