David Freedman joins the Department of Neurobiology

It is a pleasure to welcome Dr. David Freedman to the Department of Neurobiology.

Dr. Freedman comes from Harvard, where he was a post-doctoral fellow with John Assad, working on learning in extrastriate visual areas (high level visual areas of the cerebral cortex). Before that, he completed his Ph.D. with Earl Miller at M.I.T.

In previous work, Freedman and co-workers compared the roles of neurons in the frontal, temporal and parietal lobes during visual categorization, and found that the activity of neurons in the parietal and frontal lobes reflects the learned significance, or category membership, of visual stimuli as a result of experience. This contrasted sharply with the response patterns in brain areas considered to be more involved in sensory processing (such as the middle temporal and inferior temporal cortices) which seemed more involved in visual feature encoding and did not reflect more abstract, or meaningful, information about stimuli.

Moving forward, the central goal of the Freedman laboratory is to understand how the brain transforms visual feature encoding in sensory brain areas into more abstract and experience-dependent representations that reflect the behavioral significance of visual stimuli.

To study this process, they use advanced multielectrode neurophysiological techniques to record the activity of groups of cortical neurons from multiple brain areas during performance of behavioral tasks that require visual learning, memory and recognition.

For more information

Freedman Lab website

David Freedman Faculty page

For other departmental spotlights, see our Research Archive.