Marlene Behrmann

Carnegie Mellon University | CMU · Department of Psychology

The human brain continuously integrates information across its two hemispheres to construct a coherent representation of the perceptual world. Characterizing how visual information is represented in each hemisphere over time is crucial for understanding how hemispheric transfer contributes to perception. Here, we investigated information processing...

The topographic organization of category-selective responses in human ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOTC) and its relationship to regions subserving language functions is remarkably uniform across individuals. This arrangement is thought to result from the clustering of neurons responding to similar inputs, constrained by intrinsic architecture...

The neural processes underlying attentional processing are typically lateralized in adults, with spatial attention associated with the right hemisphere (RH) and object-based attention with the left hemisphere (LH). Using a modified two-rectangle attention paradigm, we compared the lateralization profiles of individuals with childhood hemispherectom...

Neural representations for visual stimuli typically emerge with a bilateral distribution across occipitotemporal cortex (OTC)? Pediatric patients undergoing unilateral OTC resection offer an opportunity to evaluate whether representations for visual stimulus individuation can sufficiently develop in a single OTC. Here, we assessed the non-resected...

The ventral temporal cortex (VTC) of the human cerebrum is critically engaged in computations related to high-level vision. One intriguing aspect of this region is its asymmetric organization and functional lateralization. Notably, in the VTC, neural responses to words are stronger in the left hemisphere, whereas neural responses to faces are stron...

Recent neuroimaging and eye‐tracking studies have suggested that children with autism exhibit more variable and idiosyncratic brain responses and eye movements than typically developing (TD) children. Here, we extended this research to pupillometry recordings. We successfully acquired pupillometry recordings from 111 children (74 with autism), 4.5‐...

Functional changes in the pediatric brain following neural injuries attest to remarkable feats of plasticity. Investigations of the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie this plasticity have largely focused on activation in the penumbra of the lesion or in contralesional, homotopic regions. Here, we adopt a whole-brain approach to evaluate the p...

In primates, the presence of a face in a visual scene captures attention and rapidly directs the observer's gaze to the face, even when the face is not relevant to the task at hand. Here, we explored a neural circuit that might potentially play a causal role in this powerful behavior. In our previous research, two monkeys received microinfusions of...

In the typically developing (TD) brain, neural representations for visual stimulus categories (e.g., faces, objects, and words) emerge in bilateral occipitotemporal cortex (OTC), albeit with weighted asymmetry; in parallel, recognition behavior continues to be refined. A fundamental question is whether two hemispheres are necessary or redundant for...

The human brain continuously integrates information across its two hemispheres to construct a coherent representation of the perceptual world. Characterising how visual information is represented in each hemisphere over time is crucial for understanding how hemispheric transfer contributes to perception. Here, we investigated information processing...

Although the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) in left temporal cortex is considered the pre-eminent region in visual word processing, other regions are also implicated. We examined the entire text-selective circuit, using functional MRI. Ten regions of interest (ROIs) per hemisphere were defined, which, based on clustering, grouped into early vision, h...

Recent neuroimaging and eye tracking studies have suggested that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may exhibit more variable and idiosyncratic brain responses and eye movements than typically developing (TD) children. Here we extended this research for the first time to pupillometry recordings. We successfully completed pupillometry reco...

Hemispherectomy is a surgical procedure in which an entire hemisphere of a patient’s brain is resected or functionally disconnected to manage seizures in individuals with drug-resistant epilepsy. Despite the extensive loss of both ventral and dorsal visual pathways in one hemisphere, pediatric patients who have undergone hemispherectomy show a rema...

Characterisation of the postoperative structural integrity of cortex in adults who have undergone cortical resection surgery for the management of epilepsy has yielded mixed findings. In some cases, patients show persistent or accelerated cortical atrophy, while in others, atrophy decelerates or even reverses. Whether this variability applies as we...

Hemispherectomy is a surgical procedure in which an entire hemisphere of a patient's brain is resected or functionally disconnected to manage seizures in individuals with drug-resistant epilepsy. Despite the extensive loss of input from both ventral and dorsal visual pathways of one hemisphere, pediatric patients who have undergone hemispherectomy...

Although the left hemisphere (LH) Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) is considered the pre-eminent cortical region engaged in visual text processing, other regions in both hemispheres have also been implicated. To examine the entire circuit, using functional MRI data, we defined ten regions of interest (ROI) in each hemisphere that, based on functional c...

Recently, we drew on evidence from neuroimaging, computational modelling, and neuropsychology to suggest that global shape information may be computed in the dorsal visual pathway and transmitted to the ventral pathway to support object recognition. In their commentary, Goodale and Milner argued that this framework was inconsistent with the respons...

Holistic processing (HP) of faces refers to the obligatory, simultaneous processing of the parts and their relations, and it emerges over the course of development. HP is manifest in a decrement in the perception of inverted versus upright faces and a reduction in face processing ability when the relations between parts are perturbed. Here, adoptin...

Despite their anatomical and functional distinctions, there is growing evidence that the dorsal and ventral visual pathways interact to support object recognition. However, the exact nature of these interactions remains poorly understood. Is the presence of identity-relevant object information in the dorsal pathway simply a byproduct of ventral inp...

Although the presence of face patches in primate inferotemporal (IT) cortex is well established, the functional and causal relationships among these patches remain elusive. In two monkeys, muscimol was infused sequentially into each patch or pair of patches to assess their respective influence on the remaining IT face network and the amygdala, as d...

The right and left cerebral hemispheres are important for face and word recognition, respectively—a specialization that emerges over human development. The question is whether this bilateral distribution is necessary or whether a single hemisphere, be it left or right, can support both face and word recognition. Here, face and word recognition accu...

Sensory abnormalities are characteristic of autism and schizophrenia. In autism, greater trial-to-trial variability (TTV) in sensory neural responses suggest that the system is more unstable. However, these findings have only been identified in the amplitude and not in the timing of neural responses, and have not been fully explored in schizophreni...

A rich behavioral literature has shown that human object recognition is supported by a representation of shape that is tolerant to variations in an object's appearance. Such 'global' shape representations are achieved by describing objects via the spatial arrangement of their local features, or structure, rather than by the appearance of the featur...

Despite their anatomical and functional distinctions, there is growing evidence that the dorsal and ventral visual pathways interact to support object recognition. However, the exact nature of these interactions remains poorly understood. Is the presence of identity-relevant object information in the dorsal pathway simply a byproduct of ventral inp...

Object recognition is the process by which humans organize the visual world into meaningful perceptual units. To understand this ability in humans, it is important to examine its origins in infancy and the processes by which it reaches maturity. In this review, we examine the development of object recognition by synthesizing research from developme...

Individuals with autism typically experience a range of symptoms, including abnormal sensory sensitivities. However, there are conflicting reports on the sensory profiles that characterize the sensory experience in autism that often depend on the type of stimulus. Here, we examine early auditory processing to simple changes in pitch and later audit...

Although there is mounting evidence that input from the dorsal visual pathway is crucial for object processes in the ventral pathway, the specific functional contributions of dorsal cortex to these processes remain poorly understood. Here, we hypothesized that dorsal cortex computes the spatial relations among an object's parts - a processes crucia...

Small average differences in the left-right asymmetry of cerebral cortical thickness have been reported in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to typically developing controls, affecting widespread cortical regions. The possible impacts of these regional alterations in terms of structural network effects have not previously bee...

The human cortical visual system consists of two major pathways, a ventral pathway that subserves perception and a dorsal pathway that primarily subserves visuomotor control. Previous studies have found that children with cortical resections of the ventral visual pathway retain largely normal visuoperceptual abilities. Whether visually guided actio...

Studies of face perception in primates elucidate the psychological and neural mechanisms that support this critical and complex ability. Recent progress in characterizing face perception across species, for example in insects and reptiles, has highlighted the ubiquity over phylogeny of this key ability for social interactions and survival. Here, we...

Significance We introduce the Interactive Topographic Network (ITN), a computational framework for modeling cortical organization of high-level vision. Through simulations of ITN models, we demonstrate that the topographic clustering of domains in primate inferotemporal cortex may arise from the demands of visual recognition under biological constr...

For children with medication-resistant epilepsy who undergo multilobar or hemispheric surgery, the goal of achieving seizure freedom is met with a variety of potential functional consequences, both favorable and unfavorable. However, there is a paucity of literature that comprehensively addresses the cognitive, medical, behavioral, orthopedic, and...

Although there is mounting evidence that input from the dorsal visual pathway is crucial for object processes in the ventral pathway, the specific functional contributions of dorsal cortex to these processes remain poorly understood. Here, we hypothesized that dorsal cortex computes the spatial relations among an object’s parts – a processes crucia...

Congenital prosopagnosia (CP), a life-long impairment in face processing that occurs in the absence of any apparent brain damage, provides a unique model in which to explore the psychological and neural bases of normal face processing. The goal of this review is to offer a theoretical and conceptual framework that may account for the underlying cog...

Despite our differences, there is much about the natural visual world that most observers perceive in common. Across adults, approximately 30% of the brain is activated in a consistent fashion while viewing naturalistic input. At what stage of development is this consistency of neural profile across individuals present? Here, we focused specificall...

Face perception is considered to be evolutionarily adaptive and conserved across species. While subcortical visual brain areas are implicated in face perception based on existing evidence from phylogenetic and ontogenetic studies, whether these subcortical structures contribute to more complex visual computations such as the holistic processing (HP...

Inferotemporal cortex (IT) in humans and other primates is topo-graphically organized, containing multiple hierarchically-organized areas selective for particular domains, such as faces and scenes. This organization is commonly viewed in terms of evolved domain-specific visual mechanisms. Here, we develop an alternative, domain-general and developm...

The human cortical visual system consists of two major pathways, a ventral pathway that subserves perception and a dorsal pathway that subserves visuomotor control. These pathways follow dissociable developmental trajectories, and, accordingly, might be differentially susceptible to neurodevelopmental disorders or injuries. Previous studies have fo...

Small average differences in the left-right asymmetry of cerebral cortical thickness have been reported in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to typically developing controls. Although these alterations affect multiple and widespread cortical regional asymmetries, the extent to which specific structural networks might be affec...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Individuals with migraine generally experience photophobia and/or phonophobia during and between migraine attacks. Many different mechanisms have been postulated to explain these migraine phenomena including abnormal patterns of connectivity across the cortex. The results, however, remain contradictory and there is no clear consensus on the nature...

A rapid and cost-effective noninvasive tool to detect and characterize neural silences can be of important benefit in diagnosing and treating many disorders. We propose an algorithm, SilenceMap, for uncovering the absence of electrophysiological signals, or neural silences, using noninvasive scalp electroencephalography (EEG) signals. By accounting...

Leslie Gail Ungerleider, a distinguished experimental psychologist and neuroscientist, previously Chief of the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the National Institute of Mental Health, died suddenly on 11 December 2020. Friends, family, colleagues, and trainees all the world over mourn her passing, but also celebrate her life and extraordinary...

Spontaneous activity of the human brain has been well documented, but little is known about the functional role of this ubiquitous neural phenomenon. It has previously been hypothesized that spontaneous brain activity underlies unprompted (internally generated) behaviour. We tested whether spontaneous brain activity might underlie internally-genera...

Despite the relative successes in the surgical treatment of pharmacoresistant epilepsy, there is rather little research on the neural (re)organization that potentially subserves behavioral compensation. Here, we examined the post-surgical functional connectivity (FC) in children and adolescents who have undergone unilateral cortical resection and,...

The right and left cerebral hemispheres are important for face and word recognition, respectively—a specialization that emerges over human development. The question is whether this bilateral distribution is necessary or whether a single hemisphere, be it left or right, can support both face and word recognition. Here, face and word recognition accu...

A rapid and cost-effective noninvasive tool to detect and characterize suppressed neural activity can be of significant benefit for the diagnosis and treatment of many disorders. We propose a novel algorithm, SilenceMap, for uncovering the absence of electrophysiological signals, or neural "silences", using noninvasive scalp electroencephalography...

We recently argued that human unfamiliar face identity perception reflects substantial perceptual expertise, and that the advantage for familiar over unfamiliar face identity matching reflects a learned mapping between generic high-level perceptual features and a unique identity representation of each individual (Blauch, Behrmann and Plaut, 2020)....

Abnormal trial‐to‐trial variability (TTV) has been identified as a key feature of neural processing that is related to increased symptom severity in autism. The majority of studies evaluating TTV have focused on cortical processing. However, identifying whether similar atypicalities are evident in the peripheral nervous system will help isolate per...

You can access the dataset from here: https://doi.org/10.1184/R1/12636731. We used a high-density electroencephalography (HD-EEG) system, with 128 customized electrode locations, to record from 17 individuals with migraine (12 female) in the interictal period, and 18 age- and gender-matched healthy control subjects, during visual (vertical grating...

Individuals with migraine generally experience photophobia and/or phonophobia during and between migraine attacks. Many different mechanisms have been postulated to explain these migraine phenomena including abnormal patterns of connectivity across the cortex. The results, however, remain contradictory and there is no clear consensus on the nature...

Whether colour information contributes to the process of face recognition remains controversial. We examine this question here by evaluating the face recognition performance of individuals who are colour blind. Specifically, we compared the performance profile of colour blind and matched control individuals on a colour face recognition task where s...

Despite the relative successes in the surgical treatment of pharmacoresistant epilepsy, there is rather little research on the neural (re)organization that potentially subserves behavioral compensation. Here, we examined the post-surgical functional connectivity (FC) in children and adolescents who have undergone unilateral cortical resection and,...

Recent research has demonstrated that neural and behavioral data acquired in response to viewing face images can be used to reconstruct the images themselves. However, the theoretical implications, promises, and challenges of this direction of research remain unclear. We evaluate the potential of this research for elucidating the visual representat...

According to the influential “Two Visual Pathways” hypothesis, the cortical visual system is segregated into two pathways, with the ventral, occipitotemporal pathway subserving object perception, and the dorsal, occipitoparietal pathway subserving the visuomotor control of action. However, growing evidence suggests that the dorsal pathway also play...

Objective: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are common neurodevelopmental disorders that frequently co-occur. The authors sought to directly compare these disorders using structural brain imaging data from ENIGMA consortium data. Methods: Structural T1-weight...

You can access the dataset from here: https://doi.org/10.1184/R1/12402416 This dataset includes structural MRI and EEG raw data related to the paper entitled Chamanzar, Behrmann, and Grover (2020), where we have proposed the SilenceMap algorithm to localize neural silences using noninvasive scalp EEG. The link to our paper will be made available as...

You can access the code from here: https://github.com/Chamanzar/SilenceMap SilenceMap is a novel algorithm for detection of neural “silences” using noninvasive scalp electroencephalography (EEG) signals. Regions of “silences” are defined as parts of the brain tissue with little or no neural activity, e.g., ischemic, necrotic, or lesional tissue in...