Pablo Polosecki

Presented by Winrich Freiwald

Licenciado, University of Buenos Aires

Specialized Signals for Spatial Attention in the Ventral and Dorsal Visual Streams

Pablo Polosecki once founded a club on campus with the purpose of discussing the foundations of science and philosophy. This was not by coincidence. Pablo had come to Rockefeller after undergraduate studies in philosophy and theoretical physics in Buenos Aires, and thesis work on human cognition. Pablo is interested in fundamentals.

In his thesis, Pablo worked on how the brain controls the focus of attention. As I am sure you are aware, we are not just passive recipients of the pieces of information that happen to impinge on our senses, but active selectors of that information. Some of you might even take pride in your ability simply not to listen to what you don’t want to hear. This is attention at work! Pablo put a fundamental theory of attention to the test. The theory states that there has to be a master map in the brain that controls the focus of attention. For several decades, a particular brain area had been thought to serve that function. But through a clever new behavioral paradigm and recordings of brain activity, Pablo could show that that area is actually doing something fundamentally different. However, Pablo discovered that the proposed master map actually does exist, and that it has, in fact, exactly the properties that had been postulated. Yet he found that map in a part of the brain where no one had expected it to be—a finding with profound implications
for neurology.

Pablo has many outstanding qualities as a human being and as a scientist, but the one that’s most unique is his ability to distill a problem to its essence and to provide a new and often surprising perspective. His witty remarks and poignant comments have been frequent highlights at our group meetings, and I, for one, would often turn to him to try out an idea, and have enjoyed many insightful and stimulating discussions with him over the years. I will greatly miss them.

As you might guess, Pablo is now seeking a new challenge and a new level of abstraction— from philosophy, theoretical physics, and cognitive brain science, Pablo is now setting out to the field of data science, where he is destined to make deeply meaningful discoveries.