Nancy G. Kanwisher | |
---|---|
Born | 1958 (age 65–66) |
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]
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]
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]
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]
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Kanwisher, 56