Research on Visual Perception Wins 2012 Prize

The US scientist, Marlene R. Cohen PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at the University of Pittsburgh has won the 2012 Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology. Dr Cohen uses the response of groups of visual neurons to estimate which part of the visual world an animal is paying attention to at any given moment. Her approach provides a new way to study how our mental activity affects what we perceive and how cognitive processes such as attention are controlled.

Dr Cohen writes “No matter how hard people concentrate on a task, their minds wander. These cognitive fluctuations can greatly alter both perception and neuronal responses, but they cannot be measured behaviourally or from conventional neurophysiological measures.

“As a postdoctoral associate with John Maunsell, I developed a method for estimating these cognitive fluctuations using the responses of a few dozen neurons in visual cortex. This showed that fluctuations in visual attention have large and complex effects on an animal's ability to perform a simple perceptual task. The ability to measure attentional fluctuations provides new insights into how attention is controlled in the brain and the ways in which different cognitive fluctuations affect perception.” In the future, Dr Cohen plans to use these methods to study how fluctuations in attention and other cognitive states affect the computations performed in the brain and how sensory information is used to guide behaviour.”

The Prize is sponsored by Eppendorf and the journal Science. This international US$25,000 prize is open to scientists of 35 years of age or younger who have made outstanding contributions to neurobiological research. The next deadline for applications is June 15, 2013. For more information about Dr Cohen and the Prize, visit www.eppendorf.com/prize.