Doris Tsao

How the Brain Represents the Visual World

Session Abstract

I will discuss our current understanding of how the primate brain perceives the visual world, including how it represents faces and objects and how it creates a meaningful representation of a complex, dynamic scene.

Speaker Bio

Doris Tsao is a professor of biology at the University of California Berkeley and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She joined UC Berkeley in 2021, and prior to that was professor at Caltech from 2009-2021. She studied biology and mathematics at Caltech as an undergraduate and received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard in 2002. Her central interest is in understanding the neural mechanisms underlying vision. Her lab seeks to understand how visual objects and actions are represented in the brain and how these representations are used to guide behavior. Her lab is investigating mechanisms at multiple stages in the visual hierarchy, from early processes for segmenting visual input into discrete objects, to mid- and high-level perceptual processes for assigning meaningful identity to specific objects, to processes by which these perceptual representations are integrated into coherent scene representations. Techniques used include: electrophysiology, fMRI, electrical microstimulation, optogenetics, anatomical tracing, psychophysics and mathematical modeling.

She has received multiple honors including the Sofia Kovalevskaya Award (2004), Eppendorf & Science International Prize in Neurobiology (2006), MacArthur Fellowship (2018). She was elected to the National Academy of Science in 2020.