The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Winrich Freiwald, Ph.D., assistant professor, Laboratory of Neural Systems, The Rockefeller University

Speaker bio(s)

Humans, like all primates, take great interest in faces. This is because faces, by structure and internal dynamics, display a plethora of social information for a visual system that can extract it. The primate brain does this through specialized hardware. The functional organization of these specializations, a network of tightly interconnected areas packed with face cells, each tuned to a different dimension of facial information, provides us with a unique model system to understand the computational principles and neural mechanisms of visual object recognition. Yet faces are special: they are not only a particularly well-defined object category, but they provide powerful inroads into the social brain as they evoke emotions, activate memories, draw and direct attention, and elicit communicative reactions. Faces trigger these processes in an automatic fashion, suggesting that just as the perceptual analysis of faces is supported by specialized hardware, these diverse cognitive functions may be as well. In his talk, Dr. Freiwald will describe recent advances towards understanding how the face-processing system encodes, transforms, and packages facial information, and how the face-processing network is embedded into the brain in ways to suggest specific pathways for social information processing and a deep evolutionary heritage of high-level social cognition in humans.

 

Dr. Freiwald, a native of Oldenburg, Germany, performed his graduate work at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt and received his Ph.D. from Tübingen University in 1998. He then joined the Institute for Brain Research at the University of Bremen as a research assistant. Starting in 2001, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study in Delmenhorst, Germany. He was head of the primate brain imaging group at the Centers for Advanced Imaging and Cognitive Sciences in Bremen from 2004 to 2008 and a visiting associate at the California Institute of Technology in 2009. He joined The Rockefeller University as assistant professor in 2009. Dr. Freiwald was named a Pew Scholar in 2010 and a McKnight Scholar in 2011; he also received an Esther and Joseph Klingenstein Fellowship in 2010, a Sinsheimer Scholarship in 2010 and an Irma T. Hirschl/Monique Weill-Caulier Trusts Research Award in 2009.

 

Open to

Public

Host

Jeffrey Friedman, M.D., Ph.D.

Reception

Refreshments, 3:15 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Abby Lounge

Contact

Linda Hanssler

Phone

(212) 327-7714

Sponsor

Linda Hanssler
(212) 327-7714
lhanssler@rockefeller.edu

Readings

http://librarynews.rockefeller.edu/?p=3917