Wilbert Zarco, Ph.D.

Research

Face perception is the ability that conveys to us information about identity, gender, mood, which all are important for social interactions and ultimately guide our behavior. It has recently been suggested that humans and monkeys share most of the cortical machinery to process this particular object category. In the monkey, faces are processed by a dedicated network of six interconnected face selective patches distributed across the temporal lobe. Thus the face patch system offers a superb opportunity to investigate the neural mechanisms of object perception. We are studying the neural mechanisms that participate in building up complex object selectivity and determine the correlation and causal link between neural signals during varying levels of perceptual awareness of faces. Our approach can overcome limitations that have hampered high-level vision research enhancing the probability of revealing novel knowledge and propose mechanistic theories of object recognition.