Neuroscientists are now using magnetic resonance imaging to study brain activity related to many different types of behavior. When used to measure activity, rather than anatomical structure, the measurements are called functional MRI (fMRI). In the first part of the talk I will describe the principles of fMRI and why this method represents a significant advance over other neuroimaging techniques. One of the most active areas of fMRI research is vision science; brain areas involved in vision represent roughly one-third of the human cortex. In the second part of the talk I will review our current understanding of the human visual pathways and several important open questions about vision. Then, I will describe how various investigators are measuring responses to visual stimuli in the human brain and using these measurements to infer how we see.

Professor Brian Wandell has been a member of the Psychology and Neuroscience Departments at Stanford University since 1979. His research includes the study of color appearance, surface and illuminant estimation algorithms, industrial applications of color science, and functional magnetic resonance imaging of brain activity. Wandell is a Fellow the Optical Society of America; he has served as an editor of Vision Research; he is the principal organizer of the Smart Color Conference on image systems engineering; and he is the author of the textbook Foundations of Vision. Wandell won the 1986 Troland Research Award from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences for his work in color vision.

This Forum is OPEN to the public.
Host: Marti Hearst, (415) 812-4742, hearst@parc.xerox.com