Research

I investigate human and mammal brains from a variety of perspectives. I use computational, behavioral, and theoretical approaches and focus especially on vision coding.

One ongoing strand of work focuses on natural, aesthetic, and artistic stimuli and their processing and creation.

In tandem, I collaborate with Yan Hao (Math & CS) to investigate the fundamental principles of communication among neurons in mammal brains. In particular, my multiple strands of research focus on:

(1) network dynamics in cortex and at the whole-brain level

(2) principles of efficient visual system processing of natural scenes, artwork, and faces in the visual stream

(3) models and mechanisms in neuroaesthetics

Tying all of these strands together is the notion of efficiency: neural systems are shaped by evolutionary adaptation, which tends to produce solutions that are well matched to environmental demands. However, efficiency is not simply about using the smallest amount of resources; it also depends on handling and representing information in a way that is useful to the organism. Drawing on notions from information theory in physics, the encoding of environmental stimuli can be rigorously defined and implemented in physiological simulations and computer vision approaches.