Kalanit Grill-Spector (Hebrew: כלנית גריל-ספקטור), is a cognitive neuroscientist, the Susan S and William H Hindle Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and a member of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University. Her research investigates how the human visual cortex is organized functionally and anatomically, how it develops, and how its neural computations give rise to visual perception. Her work has advanced understanding of the functional organization and development of the human visual cortex and inspired biologically grounded computational models of cortical organization.
Education Grill-Spector received her undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She completed her Ph.D. Weizmann Institute of Science under Rafael Malach, where she investigated the functional organization of human visual cortex using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). She subsequently carried out postdoctoral research with Nancy Kanwisher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the faculty at Stanford University in 2001. At Stanford she is Professor of Psychology, directing the vision perception neuroscience lab, a member of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, and is affiliated with the Symbolic Systems Program and the Neurosciences Graduate Program.
Research Grill-Spector's research investigates the functional and structural organization, development, and computational principles of the human visual cortex and how they support visual perception. Her work combines functional MRI, quantitative MRI, diffusion MRI, intracranial electrophysiology, psychophysics, and computational modeling to study the neural mechanisms underlying visual perception and categorization.
Functional organization of human high-level visual cortex Grill-Spector's research focuses on how the human brain represents visual information and supports visual recognition, face recognition, reading, and categorization. A major focus of Grill-Spector's research has been understanding the functional and structural organization of high-level visual cortex. During her doctoral research she pioneered with Rafael Malach fMRI adaptation, a method that uses repeated functional MRI measurements to study the selectivity of neural populations. The approach has been widely used in cognitive neuroscience to investigate the representations underlying perception, memory, language, and decision making. Her research characterized the organization of high-level visual cortex, characterizing shape and object representations in the lateral occipital complex (LOC) and establishing organizing principles of the ventral visual stream including how cortical representations of faces, objects, places, and words are arranged in ventral temporal cortex (VTC) to support visual categorization. Her laboratory investigated how the functional organization of high-level visual cortex relates to brain anatomy across multiple spatial scales, demonstrating systematic relationships with cortical folding, cytoarchitectonic subdivisions of ventral temporal cortex, and patterns of white matter connectivity, further showing that these organizing principles are present from birth.
Neural responses and visual perception Another major theme of Grill-Spector's research is investigating how neural responses in human visual cortex relate to visual perception. Her work showed that activity in high-level visual cortex is linked to visual recognition, including the LOC and VTC and face detection and identification in face-selective regions of the fusiform gyrus. Subsequent collaborative work using intracranial recordings and direct electrical stimulation in neurosurgical patients provided evidence for the causal role of face-selective regions in the fusiform gyrus in face perception.
Development of the human visual system Grill-Spector has investigated how the human visual system develops from infancy through adulthood. Her research demonstrated differential developmental trajectories across high-level visual cortex, showing that cortical face-selective responses are detectable by 4–6 months of age, yet face-selective cortex undergoes particularly prolonged development throughout childhood and adolescence, in contrast to object- and place-selective cortex, which become adult-like by adolescence. Longitudinal and cross-sectional fMRI studies provided evidence for cortical recycling during childhood, showing that regions of ventral temporal cortex involved in visual processing of limbs in young children are repurposed for visual processing of faces and words during adolescence. Her laboratory subsequently investigated the anatomical development of the visual system using quantitative MRI, diffusion MRI, and histology. This work showed that major white matter pathways are present in infancy and continue to undergo myelination and structural refinement throughout development. It further showed that the visual cortex undergoes hierarchical microstructural development, with early visual areas being more mature at birth but developing more slowly postnatal than higher-level visual areas, and that developmental changes in cortical function are accompanied by changes in tissue microstructure of the ventral temporal cortex.
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