Research Interests
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Attention
- Visual Perception
Research Description
At the most general level, my research program is aimed at identifying the cognitive processes and neural structures that enable and limit our visual representations of the world. For instance, I am interested in: what processes determine whether or not we are aware of a visual object or event, can report its presence, or can recall it later; what mechanisms constrain the number of items we can effectively process at the same time; how higher-level processes such as attention modulate activity in visual cortex; and, why some stimuli (e.g. natural scenes)are processed so quickly and with relatively little effort. We use a variety of approaches to address these questions, including functional magnetic resonance imaging, behavioral methods, and transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Education
Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
External Links
Recent Publications
Metzger, B. A., & Beck, D. M. (2020). Probing the mechanisms of probe-mediated binocular rivalry. Vision Research, 173, 21-28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2020.04.011
Center, E. G., Knight, R., Fabiani, M., Gratton, G., & Beck, D. M. (2019). Examining the role of feedback in TMS-induced visual suppression: A cautionary tale. Consciousness and Cognition, 75, [102805]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2019.102805
Michel, M., Beck, D., Block, N., Blumenfeld, H., Brown, R., Carmel, D., Carrasco, M., Chirimuuta, M., Chun, M., Cleeremans, A., Dehaene, S., Fleming, S. M., Frith, C., Haggard, P., He, B. J., Heyes, C., Goodale, M. A., Irvine, L., Kawato, M., ... Yoshida, M. (2019). Opportunities and challenges for a maturing science of consciousness. Nature human behaviour, 3(2), 104-107. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0531-8
Groen, I. I. A., Greene, M. R., Baldassano, C., Fei-Fei, L., Beck, D. M., & Baker, C. I. (2018). Distinct contributions of functional and deep neural network features to representational similarity of scenes in human brain and behavior. eLife, 7, [e32962]. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.32962
Baldassano, C., Beck, D. M., & Fei-Fei, L. (2017). Human-object interactions are more than the sum of their parts. Cerebral Cortex, 27(3), 2276-2288. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhw077
