Innovators in
Cognitive Neuroscience

Dwight Kravitz

George Washington University

April 7, 2021

Title:
Predicting functional organization and its impact on behavior

Abstract:
Cognitive neuroscience is the attempt to use physiological observation to clarify the mechanisms that shape behavior. At this point, there is a wealth of data from animal models and neuroimaging investigations in human providing a multimodal quantification of the response evoked by a wide variety of stimuli and task contexts. What remains less clear is the consequences of the observed functional organization for behavior beyond simply grounding it in the underlying biology. Here, those consequences are explored through testing a novel set of behavioral predictions which could not have been made without our understanding of the physiology. We begin with a brief interrogation of the methodological and theoretical frameworks underlying our derivation of the functional organization of the primate visual system, partially by demonstrating its relationship to and predictability from gross neuroanatomy. Next, across a series of studies, the behavioral implications of two properties of functional organization will be explored: 1) the co-localization of function, specifically visual working memory and perceptual processing and 2) implicit learning in the context of distributed neural representation. In sum, these results highlight the limitations of our current approach and hint at a new general mechanism for explaining observed behavior in context with the neural substrate.

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