Doris Tsao, PhD

Research Interests

Doris is first and foremost a Vision Scientist. The central question that guides her lab is: how does the brain represent the visual world? Her interests span all levels of the visual brain, from early/mid-level retinotopic areas, to high-level areas in the parietal and temporal lobes, to prefrontal cortex. She is especially interested in visual object representation, and has done extensive work both on object recognition (for a recent review, see Hesse & Tsao, Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2020) and object segmentation & tracking (see Tsao & Tsao Arxiv 2021). Her lab is currently focused on three major problems: (1) what is the function of feedback in the ventral visual pathway? (2) what is the visual code used by the primate temporal lobe?, (3) what is the neural mechanism for visual surface segmentation, tracking, and representation of 3D surface structure?