FNNDSC Lecture Series with Guest Speaker Heather Kosakowski

Описание: Speaker: Heather Kosakowski, PhD
Postdoctoral researcher in the Buckner Laboratory at Harvard University

Title: Investigating Human Infant Knowledge Using fMRI

Bio: Heather Kosakowski is an NIH D-SPAN Fellow funded by NIDA. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher in the Buckner Laboratory at Harvard University. Kosakowski completed her doctoral training at MIT, advised by Rebecca Saxe and Nancy Kanwisher. As an undergraduate, Kosakowski was mentored by Elizabeth Spelke in the Laboratory for Developmental Studies at Harvard University while she completed her BA at Wellesley College. Previously, Kosakowski obtained an AA at MassBay Community College and served in the United States Marine Corps.

Abstract: Philosophers and psychologists have long debated the relative roles of built-in structure versus learning in the developing human mind. It is only recently that whole-brain measurements from awake infants have become available to inform these debates. First, I will present data showing that pre-verbal infants’ brains distinguish faces, bodies, and scenes as distinct visual categories. Then, I will focus on faces to ask: do infants’ cortical face responses develop sequentially, first in perceptual regions followed by cognitive regions? I will show that preverbal infants have face-selective responses in temporal and prefrontal regions, suggesting that cortical function develop in parallel. These results have important implications for understanding typical brain development.