Nicole C. Rust

Last updated
Nicole C. Rust
Alma mater University of Idaho
New York University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Known for Visual Perception,
Visual Recognition Memory
Awards Troland Research Award,
McKnight Scholar,
NSF CAREER Award,
Sloan Fellow
Scientific career
Fields Neuroscience, Psychology
Institutions University of Pennsylvania
Academic advisors J. Anthony Movshon
Eero P. Simoncelli
James DiCarlo
Website www.nicolerust.com

Nicole C. Rust is an American neuroscientist, psychologist, and a Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies visual perception and visual recognition memory. She is recognized for significant advancements in experimental psychology and neuroscience. [1]

Contents

Rust was the recipient of the 2021 Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences for her fundamental contributions to understanding how the cortex makes use of complex visual information to guide intelligent behavior. [2] She was named a McKnight Foundation Scholar (2013), [3] received an NSF CAREER Award (2013) [4] and was named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow (2010). [5]

Education and early career

Rust received her bachelor's degree in from the University of Idaho in 1997. [6] She then went on to receive her PhD in Neuroscience from New York University in 2004 under the mentorship of J. Anthony Movshon, and Eero Simoncelli. [7] There, her work focused on how the primate brain processes information about visual motion, including in the primary visual cortex [8] and area MT. [9]

Career and research

Rust completed postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 2004 and 2006. There she worked under the mentorship of James DiCarlo, studying how the brain identifies the objects that are present in a visual scene. [10]

Rust joined the faculty in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. Her lab has focused on understanding how the brain uses visual information to solve different tasks, including finding sought objects [11] and remembering the images that have been encountered. [12]

Rust's group also creates machine learning algorithms that mimic neural circuits of memory. [13]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Visual cortex</span> Region of the brain that processes visual information

The visual cortex of the brain is the area of the cerebral cortex that processes visual information. It is located in the occipital lobe. Sensory input originating from the eyes travels through the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus and then reaches the visual cortex. The area of the visual cortex that receives the sensory input from the lateral geniculate nucleus is the primary visual cortex, also known as visual area 1 (V1), Brodmann area 17, or the striate cortex. The extrastriate areas consist of visual areas 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Computational neuroscience is a branch of neuroscience which employs mathematics, computer science, theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain to understand the principles that govern the development, structure, physiology and cognitive abilities of the nervous system.

The consciousness and binding problem is the problem of how objects, background and abstract or emotional features are combined into a single experience.

Matteo Carandini is a neuroscientist who studies the visual system. He is currently a professor at University College London, where he co-directs the Cortical Processing Laboratory with Kenneth D Harris.

David J. Heeger is an American neuroscientist, psychologist, computer scientist, data scientist, and entrepreneur. He is a professor at New York University, Chief Scientific Officer of Statespace Labs, and Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Epistemic AI.

The normalization model is an influential model of responses of neurons in primary visual cortex. David Heeger developed the model in the early 1990s, and later refined it together with Matteo Carandini and J. Anthony Movshon. The model involves a divisive stage. In the numerator is the output of the classical receptive field. In the denominator, a constant plus a measure of local stimulus contrast. Although the normalization model was initially developed to explain responses in the primary visual cortex, normalization is now thought to operate throughout the visual system, and in many other sensory modalities and brain regions, including the representation of odors in the olfactory bulb, the modulatory effects of visual attention, the encoding of value, and the integration of multisensory information. It has also been observed at subthreshold potentials in the hippocampus. Its presence in such a diversity of neural systems in multiple species, from invertebrates to mammals, suggests that normalization serves as a canonical neural computation. Divisive normalization reduces the redundancy in natural stimulus statistics and is sometimes viewed as an implementation of the efficient coding principle. Formally, divisive normalization is an information-maximizing code for stimuli following a multivariate Pareto distribution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Efficient coding hypothesis</span>

The efficient coding hypothesis was proposed by Horace Barlow in 1961 as a theoretical model of sensory coding in the brain. Within the brain, neurons communicate with one another by sending electrical impulses referred to as action potentials or spikes. One goal of sensory neuroscience is to decipher the meaning of these spikes in order to understand how the brain represents and processes information about the outside world. Barlow hypothesized that the spikes in the sensory system formed a neural code for efficiently representing sensory information. By efficient it is understood that the code minimized the number of spikes needed to transmit a given signal. This is somewhat analogous to transmitting information across the internet, where different file formats can be used to transmit a given image. Different file formats require different number of bits for representing the same image at given distortion level, and some are better suited for representing certain classes of images than others. According to this model, the brain is thought to use a code which is suited for representing visual and audio information representative of an organism's natural environment.

Complex cells can be found in the primary visual cortex (V1), the secondary visual cortex (V2), and Brodmann area 19 (V3).

Repetition priming refers to improvements in a behavioural response when stimuli are repeatedly presented. The improvements can be measured in terms of accuracy or reaction time and can occur when the repeated stimuli are either identical or similar to previous stimuli. These improvements have been shown to be cumulative, so as the number of repetitions increases the responses get continually faster up to a maximum of around seven repetitions. These improvements are also found when the repeated items are changed slightly in terms of orientation, size and position. The size of the effect is also modulated by the length of time the item is presented for and the length time between the first and subsequent presentations of the repeated items.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brian Wandell</span>

Brian A. Wandell is the Isaac and Madeline Stein Family Professor at Stanford University, where he is Director of the Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging, and Deputy Director of the Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute. He was a founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Vision Science.

<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.

Joseph Anthony Movshon is an American neuroscientist. He has made contributions to the understanding of the brain mechanisms that represent the form and motion of objects, and the way these mechanisms contribute to perceptual judgments and visually guided movement. He is a founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Vision Science.

Joni Wallis is a cognitive neurophysiologist and Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Social cognitive neuroscience is the scientific study of the biological processes underpinning social cognition. Specifically, it uses the tools of neuroscience to study "the mental mechanisms that create, frame, regulate, and respond to our experience of the social world". Social cognitive neuroscience uses the epistemological foundations of cognitive neuroscience, and is closely related to social neuroscience. Social cognitive neuroscience employs human neuroimaging, typically using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Human brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct-current stimulation are also used. In nonhuman animals, direct electrophysiological recordings and electrical stimulation of single cells and neuronal populations are utilized for investigating lower-level social cognitive processes.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tatyana Sharpee</span> American computational neuroscientist

Tatyana Sharpee is an American neuroscientist. She is a Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where she spearheads a research group at the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, with the support from Edwin Hunter Chair in Neurobiology. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Physics at University of California, San Diego. She was elected a fellow of American Physical Society in 2019.

Ilana B. Witten is an American neuroscientist and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. Witten studies the mesolimbic pathway, with a focus on the striatal neural circuit mechanisms driving reward learning and decision making.

Jessica Cardin is an American neuroscientist who is an associate professor of neuroscience at Yale University School of Medicine. Cardin's lab studies local circuits within the primary visual cortex to understand how cellular and synaptic interactions flexibly adapt to different behavioral states and contexts to give rise to visual perceptions and drive motivated behaviors. Cardin's lab applies their knowledge of adaptive cortical circuit regulation to probe how circuit dysfunction manifests in disease models.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carsen Stringer</span> American computational neuroscientist

Carsen Stringer is an American computational neuroscientist and Group Leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Research Campus. Stringer uses machine learning and deep neural networks to visualize large scale neural recordings and then probe the neural computations that give rise to visual processing in mice. Stringer has also developed several novel software packages that enable cell segmentation and robust analyses of neural recordings and mouse behavior.

Martin A. Giese is a German theoretical neuroscientist and biomedical engineer. He is full professor at the University of Tübingen and head of the Section Computational Sensomotorics at the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research (HIH) as well as at the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN), since 2008.

References

  1. "Academy honors 20 for major contributions to science". www.eurekalert.org. Retrieved 2021-01-24.
  2. "20210 Troland Research Award". nasonline.org. Retrieved 2021-01-24.
  3. "McKnight Scholar Awardees". www.mcknight.org. Retrieved 2021-01-24.
  4. "NSF CAREER Award Abstract #1265480". nsf.gov. Retrieved 2021-01-24.
  5. "Past Sloan Fellows". sloan.org. Retrieved 2021-01-24.
  6. "Nicole Rust Biography". sas.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2021-01-24.
  7. "Simons Foundation". simonsfoundation.org. Retrieved 2021-01-24.
  8. Rust, NC; Schwartz, O; Movshon, JA; Simoncelli, EP (2005). "Spatiotemporal Elements of Macaque V1 Receptive Fields". Neuron. 46 (6): 945–956. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2005.05.021 . PMID   15953422. S2CID   1616716.
  9. Rust, NC; Mante, V; Simoncelli, EP; Movshon, JA (2006). "How MT cells analyze the motion of visual patterns". Nat Neurosci. 9 (11): 1421–31. doi:10.1038/nn1786. PMID   17041595. S2CID   448010.
  10. DiCarlo, JJ; Zoccolan, D; Rust, NC (2012). "How does the brain solve visual object recognition?". Neuron. 73 (3): 415–434. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.01.010 . PMC   3306444 . PMID   22325196.
  11. Pagan, M; Urban, LS; Wohl, MP; Rust, NC (2013). "Signals in inferotemporal and perirhinal cortex suggest an untangling of visual target information". Nature Neuroscience. 16 (8): 1132–1139. doi:10.1038/nn.3433. PMC   3725208 . PMID   23792943.
  12. Meyer, T; Rust, NC (2013). "Single-exposure visual familiarity judgments are reflected in IT cortex". eLife. 7: e32259. doi: 10.7554/eLife.32259 . PMC   5843407 . PMID   29517485.
  13. Jaegle, Andrew; Mehrpour, Vahid; Mohsenzadeh, Yalda; Meyer, Travis; Oliva, Aude; Rust, Nicole (2019-08-29). "Population response magnitude variation in inferotemporal cortex predicts image memorability". eLife. 8: e47596. doi: 10.7554/eLife.47596 . ISSN   2050-084X. PMC   6715346 . PMID   31464687.