My research involves using functional brain imaging to explore how the healthy human brain processes visual information. In particular, I am interested in how top-down cognitive processes, like what you are paying attention to, or what you are imagining, affect the visual areas in the brain. For instance, what happens in your brain when you see a picture in your mind's eye? Researchers have long known that there are different areas of the brain specialized for processing different kinds of visual information. There is one region that responds to faces, and a separate region that responds when you look at scenes or
places. Does this same specialization occur when you simply imagine a face or a place? While taking functional scans of their brains, we asked subjects to first look at pictures of faces and places, and then to imagine those same faces and places. We found that the face area responds to both seen and imagined faces, and the place area to seen and imagined places.