Roger B Tootell, Ph.D.


Investigator Assoc Prof (M)
Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Mass General Research Institute
Associate Professor of Radiology (Neuroscience)
Harvard Medical School
brain mapping; macaca; motion perception; pattern recognition, visual; photic stimulation; temporal lobe; visual cortex; visual perception

I and my colleagues use MRI and other techniques to study the functional organization of primate visual cortex. Studies are usually conducted in both humans and awake behaving monkeys, to distinguish between features which are general, compared to those which are species-specific. In monkeys, we often use compare measurements from fMRI to measurements of the electrophysiological activity in the same brain regions, in response to the same visual stimuli. During the past decade, we have concentrated on studies of retinotopic organization, visual motion sensitivity ('dorsal stream'), and the processing of visual objects ('ventral stream'). In addition, we increasingly study cognitive functions influenced by visual information (e.g. Visual spatial attention).