Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Stefano Anzellotti has won a five-year, $600,000 National Science Foundation CAREER Award to support his research on the brain mechanisms that enable us to recognize the identity and facial expressions of others.
The NSF鈥檚 CAREER Program supports early-career faculty who 鈥渉ave the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization,鈥� according to the foundation. The program鈥檚 mission is to prepare faculty to be leaders who integrate teaching and research.
Stefano Anzellotti
鈥淭his is a very meaningful honor,鈥� said Anzellotti, who is in his second year on the md传媒国产剧 College faculty. 鈥淏eing selected for a CAREER Award indicates that my work is seen as having significance for the field, which is an important milestone for a junior faculty member. I am also pleased that the award will support the research of undergraduate and graduate students involved in the project and help prepare them for their future careers.鈥�
Anzellotti鈥檚 鈥淪CCN Lab鈥� investigates the mechanisms that enable us to recognize and understand other people.听 With the support of this CAREER Award, they will study the 鈥渃omplementarity hypothesis,鈥� which states that different tasks like recognizing identity and recognizing expressions are performed by the same brain regions鈥攕olving one of the tasks, he explained, helps to solve the other. This complementarity might be a general principle of organization of the brain.
The SCCN Lab plans to build artificial neural network models of face identity and facial expression recognition to study whether complementarity arises naturally in the models, and test their ability to predict brain activity. In addition, they will test whether similar results can be observed in other cases, studying the recognition of body identity and actions. In the end, Anzellotti and his colleagues will use new methods to investigate how multiple brain regions interact during the recognition of identity, expressions, and actions.
Anzellotti believes his work on complementarity can shed new light into social perception and more broadly into the large-scale organization of the human brain. This basic research may someday enable better understanding of social cognition and its impairments, such as Autism Spectrum disorders, he said.
鈥淚t is one step along a path鈥攂ut it could be a vital one,鈥� Anzellotti explained. 鈥淚f we have models that approximate social perception and social behavior, then we can address the question of how we need to change the models to capture the differences between different individuals: Which components are similar, and which are dissimilar, across different people?鈥�
As part of the project, Anzellotti will design courses and research opportunities for students to receive training 鈥渁t the intersection between neuroscience and artificial intelligence, preparing them to study neuroscience questions with new AI tools, and to build new AI thanks to inspiration from state-of-the-art research in neuroscience.鈥�
鈥淎I-based analysis of brain data is an important emerging area of research, and has the potential to lead to a more precise and sophisticated understanding of the brain and its disorders,鈥� he said. 鈥淎t the same time, often AI derives inspiration from neuroscience, and students with training in both AI and neuroscience can go on to make new contributions to this expanding field.鈥�
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Sean Smith | University Communications | May 2020
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