Dr. Marlene Behrmann
Dr. Marlene Behrmann is a Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, who's research specializes in the cognitive basis of visual perception, with a specific focus on object recognition. Dr. Behrmann received her B.A. in speech and hearing therapy in 1981, followed by her M.A. in speech pathology in 1984, both from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She then received a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Toronto in 1991. Dr Behrmann was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences1 in 2015.
Dr. Behrmann is widely considered to be a trailblazer and a worldwide leader in the field of visual cognition. Below is an example of recently published work from the lab:
Liu, T., Nestor, A., Vida, M. D., Pyles, J. A., Patterson, C., Yang, Y., Yang, F. N., Freud, E., Behrmann, M. (2018).Successful Reorganization of Category-Selective Visual Cortex following Occipito-temporal Lobectomy in Childhood. Cell Repots 24:1113-1122. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2018.06.099.
Investigations of functional (re)organization in children who have undergone large cortical resections offer a unique opportunity to elucidate the nature and extent of cortical plasticity. We report findings from a 3-year investigation of a child, UD, who underwent surgical removal of the right occipital and posterior temporal lobe at age 6 years 9 months. Relative to controls, post-surgically, UD showed age-appropriate intellectual performance and visuoperceptual, face and object recognition skills. Using fMRI at five different time points, we observed a persistent hemianopia and no visual field remapping. In category-selective visual cortex, however, object and scene-selective regions in the intact left hemisphere were stable early on, but regions subserving face and word recognition emerged later and evinced competition for cortical representation. These findings reveal alterations in the topography of category-selective regions when confined to a single hemisphere, and provide a novel view of dynamic functional changes in extrastriate cortical architecture.
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Professor of Psychology, Dr. Marlene Behrmann, Ph.D.
CV
B.A. in Speech and Hearing Therapy: University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
M.A. in Speech Pathology: University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Ph.D. in Psychology: University of Toronto, Canada
News
Congratulations to Dr. Behrmann for receiving the 2019 Annual Rita G. Rudel/Lucy G. Moses award! The Lecture will be at Columbia University in New York.
Congratulations to Michael Granovetter for receiving an award to attend the 2019 American Academy of Pediatrics Legislative Conference in Wasington DC in April!
Dr. Behrmann is hiring a postdoc, who will be jointly supervised by Dr. Pulkit Grover, to work on noninvasive neuroimaging measurement modalities. Read about it here.
In the news:
Dr. Behrmann joined Pittsburgh leaders in community engagement during the annual event of Leadership Pittsburgh Inc. Read about it here.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covered the latest research from the Behrmann lab. Read about it here.
New publications:
Collins, E., Freud, E., Kainerstorfer, J., Cao, J. and Behrmann, M. (2019). Temporal dynamics of shape processing as revealed by three independent visual pathways, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, in press.
Freud, E., Culham, J., Namdar, G. and Behrmann, M. Object complexity modulates the association between action and perception in childhood, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 179 (2019), 56-72.
Nemrodov, D., Behrmann, M., Niemeier, M., Drobotenko, N. and Nestor, A. Shape and surface information: multimodal evidence on individual face processing, Neuroimage, pii: S1053-8119(18)31959-1. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.09.
Liu, T., Nestor, A., Vida, M. D., Pyles, J. A., Patterson, C., Yang, Y., Yang, F. N., Freud, E., Behrmann, M. (2018).Successful Reorganization of Category-Selective Visual Cortex following Occipito-temporal Lobectomy in Childhood. Cell Repots 24:1113-1122. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2018.06.099.
Freud, E., Robinson, A. and Behrmann, M. (2018). More than action: The dorsal pathway contributes to the perception of 3D structure. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 30(7):1047-1058. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_01262. PMID: 29561234
Nah, J.C., Neppi-Modona, M., Strother, L., Behrmann, M. and Shomstein, S. (2018). Object Width Modulates Object-Based Attentional Selection, Attention, Perception and Psychophysics, 80(6):1375-1389. doi: 10.3758/s13414-018-1530-y. PMID: 29691762.
Collins, E., Robinson, A., and Behrmann, M. (2018). Distinct neural processes for the perception of familiar and unfamiliar faces along the visual hierarchy revealed by frequency tagging. Neuroimage, 181:120-131. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.06.