2017-18 Department of Psychology Colloquium Series - Michael Arcaro (Harvard Medical School)

Michael Arcaro
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Department of Neurobiology
Harvard Medical School
Boston, MA

“How the Interplay between Experience and Intrinsic
Neural Architecture Guides Development”

We are remarkably good at identifying information from a face, such as race, gender, affect, and age, even when our exposure spans just a fraction of a second. How do we develop the neural circuitry that supports such robust perception? The biological importance of faces for social primates and the stereotyped location of face-selective brain regions across individuals has engendered the idea that face regions are innate neural structures. I will present data challenging this view, where face regions in monkeys were not present at birth but instead emerged in stereotyped locations within the first few months of life. Further, experience appears to be necessary for the formation of such specialized architecture: Monkeys raised without exposure to faces did not develop face regions. But if specialized regions require experience, why do they emerge in such stereotyped locations? I will show that retinotopic maps, in which adjacent neurons represent adjacent points in visual space, are already established at birth and are predictive of where face regions will emerge. These results reveal that experience-driven changes are anchored to the intrinsic topographic organization of visual cortex, establishing a new framework for understanding how neural representations support visual perception.

Friday, March 16, 2018
1:00 p.m.
Gilmer 190

Coffee/cookies at 12:45pm.
Reception will be held after the talk.

Time and Location: 
1:00pm, GIL 190
Date: 
Friday, March 16, 2018
Subtitle: 
How the Interplay between Experience and Intrinsic Neural Architecture Guides Development