Persistence Marks Stephen Mitroff's Research
Cognitive neuroscientist explores how the brain processes movement
Friday, October 21, 2005
Durham, N.C. -- Persistence is an admirable quality in people, but it’s
absolutely necessary in vision, says new Assistant Professor of
Psychological and Brain Sciences Stephen
Mitroff. While neuroscientists have long concentrated on
understanding how the visual system perceives shapes and colors,
Mitroff is tackling the mysteries of how the visual system
“understands” that moving objects are the same from one moment to
the next.
Arriving at Duke from a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale, Mitroff received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard. He earned his B.A. at the University of California at Berkeley.
“There’s a ton of literature on how we know what objects are, but not a whole lot about how we know an object is the same thing you just saw before,” he said. “So, I want to study how the visual system might work to keep track of objects as being the same.”
To explore these mysteries, his research will test the details of how volunteer subjects perceive the movement, appearance and disappearance of objects on a screen -- using clever experimental design to manipulate those perceptions to probe the neural machinery behind them.
A member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, he also plans to use the center’s sophisticated brain-scanning techniques to analyze how regions of the brain activate during such perceptual tasks.
