David Heeger, Professor of Psychology and Neural Science
www.cns.nyu.edu/~david/

I received my Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania. I was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, a research scientist at the NASA-Ames Research Center, and an Associate Professor at Stanford before coming NYU.

My research spans an interdisciplinary cross-section of engineering, psychology, and neuroscience. In the fields of image processing, computer vision, and computer graphics, I have worked on motion estimation and image registration, wavelet image representations, anisotropic diffusion (edge-preserving noise reduction), image fidelity metrics (for evaluating image data compression algorithms), texture analysis/synthesis and scientific visualization. In the fields of perceptual psychology and systems/cognitive neuroscience, I have worked on computational models of neuronal processing in the visual system, psychophysical (perceptual psychology) measurements of human vision, and neuroimaging.

The current focus of my research is to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to quantitatively investigate the relationship between brain and behavior. The vast majority of neuroimaging experiments from other labs around the world have focused on which parts of the brain are involved in a particular cognitive or perceptual task. Although this has been an important first step, perception and cognition depend not only on which brain areas are active, but also on how neuronal activity within each of those areas varies over space and time. We are using fMRI to measure the timing and amplitude of brain activity, for testing computational theories of the neural processing underlying cognition and perception. We are using fMRI to study visual awareness, visual pattern detection/discrimination, visual motion perception, stereo depth perception, attention, working memory, the control of eye and hand movements, and neural processing of complex audio-visual and emotional experiences (movies, music, narrative).