Anna W. Roe, PhD

My research focuses on the organization and functional circuitry of visual perception. By understanding principles of information processing in this model system, I am to derive general processing strategies in the brain.

Towards this goal, I have studied the organization of visual information processing in nonhuman primates, an animal model with vision and visual brain organizations very similar to that of humans. This has allowed me to employ a combination of electrical, optical, and ultrahigh field MRI methods to study:

1. Information maps in the brain (e.g. for visual color, shape, motion, and depth). By developing optical windows on the brain, I showed these maps are highly organized at mesoscale (submillimeter scale). This means clusters of nearby cells process information of similar feature (e.g color) and that cluster preferences shift (e.g. red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple) every few hundred microns.
2. Information networks in the brain.  To study brainwide networks, I developed a method of stimulating single information clusters and mapping evoked responses at connected sites in highfield MRI.

Surprisingly, in every area sampled, I found that stimulation of single clusters leads to activation of a brainwide network of clusters and that these lie in multiple cortical and subcortical areas spanning sensory, motor, associative, cognitive, and limbic behavioral axes. These findings suggest information processing the brain rests on an architecture of organized mesoscale networks.

At NYU (Dept of Psychiatry) and Nathan Kline Institute (Director of Translational Neuroscience), I aim to further understand the organization of this network architecture with the goals of: (1) understanding how it dynamically mediates active vision, (2) developing mesoscale visual cortical prosthetics, and (3) understanding its role in efficient, rapid, ‘intelligent’ information processing.