Virtual: Brain meeting: Judy Fan

Brain meeting 

Abstract: How does the human mind transform a cascade of sensory information into meaningful knowledge? Traditional approaches focus on how people process the data provided to them by the world, yet this approach leaves aside some of the most powerful tools humans have to actively reformat their experiences, including the use of physical media to externalize their thoughts by drawing or writing. My lab aims to “reverse engineer” the core mechanisms by which employing such cognitive tools enable people to learn and communicate more effectively. Our recent work focuses on drawing, one of our most basic and versatile tools, because it also represents a key challenge for understanding how multiple systems interact to support complex, natural behaviors. This talk will highlight a recent study investigating the neural mechanisms enable us to produce a recognizable drawing of an object, and how this visual production experience influences how this object is represented in the brain.