| | Principal Investigators
| Leslie G. Ungerleider, Ph.D. |
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Dr.
Ungerleider received her B.A. degree from the State University
of New York at Binghamton and her Ph.D. degree, with a
major in Experimental Psychology, from New York University.
During her postdoctoral training with Karl Pribram at
Stanford University, she began her work on higher-order
perceptual mechanisms in the cortex of primates. She moved
to the NIMH in 1975, joining Mortimer Mishkin in the Laboratory
of Neuropsychology. Their neurobehavioral work inspired
their theory of ‘two cortical visual systems’,
one specialized for object recognition and the other for
visuospatial perception. In 1995, Dr. Ungerleider became
Chief of the Laboratory
of Brain and Cognition at NIMH. She is a member
of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of
Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2001, she was
the recipient of the Women in Neuroscience Lifetime Achievement
Award. |
| Research Interests |
| Dr. Ungerleider's laboratory is studying the neural mechanisms of visual attention and perception, using functional magnetic resonance imaging in humans and single-cell recording in primates. Her work has shown that in a typical scene many different objects compete for neural representation due to the limited processing capacity of the visual system. The competition among multiple objects can be biased by both bottom-up sensory-driven mechanisms and top-down influences, such as selective attention. Although the competition among stimuli for representation is ultimately resolved within visual cortex, the source of top-down biasing signals likely derives from a distributed network of areas in frontal and parietal cortex. This biased competition model of attention suggests that once attentional resources are depleted, no further processing is possible. Dr. Ungerleider's most recent work has shown that, similar to the processing of other stimulus categories, the processing of stimuli with emotional valence is under top-down control, requiring attentional resources. |
| Representative Selected Recent Publications: |
- Pessoa, L. McKenna,
M., Gutierrez, E. and Ungerleider, L.G:
Neural processing of emotional faces requires attention.
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci, USA 99, 11458-11463, 2002.
- Kastner, S. and Ungerleider,
L.G.: Mechanisms of visual attention
in the human cortex., Annu Rev. Neurosci, 23, 315-341, 2000.
- De Weerd, P., Peralta III, M. R., Desimone, R., and Ungerleider, L.G:
Loss of attentional stimulus selectivity after
extrastriate cortical lesions in macaques., Nature Neurosci 2, 753-758, 1999.
- Kastner, S., Pinsk,
M.A., De Weerd, P., Desimone, R., and Ungerleider.
L. G.: Increased activity in human visual
cortex during directed attention in the absence of
visual stimulation., Neuron
22, 751-761, 1999.
- Kastner, S., De Weerd,
P., Desimone, R. and Ungerleider, L.G:
Mechanisms of directed attention in human extrastriate
cortex as revealed by functional MRI., Science
282, 108-111, 1998.
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