Rethinking How the Brain Sees: Emily J. Allen Explores a Hidden Player in Vision
What if a part of the brain most people rarely hear about plays a key role in how humans recognize faces and bodies? Emily J. Allen, research faculty in the Department of Psychology, contributed to new research that challenges long-held assumptions about how visual information is processed in the brain.
Published in Nature Communications, the study titled “Processing of natural scenes in the human pulvinar”, led by PhD graduate of the Department of Psychology, Daniel Guest, in collaboration with University of Minnesota faculty member, Kendrick Kay, and University of Pennsylvania faculty member Michael Arcaro, points to the pulvinar, a deep brain structure, as an active partner in visual perception—working alongside the cortex rather than behind it. Allen’s role in collecting high-resolution brain imaging data and shaping the final study highlights how advances in neuroimaging and large-scale datasets are opening new ways to understand perception. Her broader research, based at the University of Minnesota’s Auditory Perception & Cognition Lab and the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, continues to push at the boundaries of how psychologists think about the brain’s sensory systems.
Emily Allen, PhD, is a research faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota and a member of the Auditory Perception and Cognition Laboratory, which is directed by Andrew Oxenham.
Composed by Nguyen Kiet Pham, communications assistant.
