Walsh-Snow Lab
Principal Investigator: Jacqueline C Walsh-Snow
Institution: University of Utah (Salt Lake City, UT)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY Our understanding of human vision is based almost exclusively on studies of experimental proxies for reality– typically artificial two-dimensional (2D) pictures. Studying responses to artificial stimuli neglects the fact that humans have evolved and developed in the real world (RW), and that our behavior and brain processes are likely to reflect the important features of tangible objects and environments, including depth, tangibility, actability, and multisensory processing. Yet little is known about how real objects are processed and represented in the brain, and how such responses compare to artificial stimuli. The long-term goal of this research is to elucidate the mechanisms that are engaged during naturalistic vision. The objective of this application is to understand how, and why RW stimuli, compared with proxies, influence behavior and brain responses. The central hypothesis is that response patterns to RW stimuli will be qualitatively different than 2D/3D pictures; these differences will unfold during development, and they will be causally linked with computations in dorsal cortex. These format-related differences will manifest during perception because the…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01EY026701-08: Bringing the real-world into cognitive neuroscience: From images to real objects (2026)
- 7R01EY026701-07: Bringing the real-world into cognitive neuroscience: From images to real objects (2025)
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