Abstract
Most humans can rapidly learn to recognize any one of the 7 billion human faces in the world, despite the fact that faces are extremely complex stimuli. Once a face has been learned, we remember it for a long time and can recognize a familiar face in a fraction of a second. In this lecture, the speaker will describe where the neurons that encode faces reside in the brain, and will explain the neuronal code the brain uses for face recognition.
About the speaker
Prof Charles F Stevens received his BA in Psychology from Harvard University (1956), an MD from Yale University (1960), and his PhD in Biophysics from the Rockefeller University (1964). He then joined the University of Washington as an Assistant Professor and returned to Yale in 1975 as a Professor. In 1986, he was appointed an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He moved to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in 1990 and is currently a Professor at the Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory. He is also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and a Research Scientist at the Kavli Institute of Brain and Mind at the University of California at San Diego.
Prof Stevens’s long-term goal is to understand the mathematical operations carried out by neural circuits, and to understand the design principles that underlie the scalable architecture of neural circuits.
Prof Stevens received numerous awards including the Award for Scientific Reviewing from the US National Academy of Sciences (2000), the Karl Spencer Lashley Award from the American Philosophical Society (2000), the Ralph W Gerard Prize in Neuroscience from the Society for Neuroscience (1999), and the W Alden Spencer Award from the Columbia University (1979). He was also elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1984), a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences (1982) and the Grass National Lecturer at the Society for Neuroscience (1981).
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