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Dr. Xu Hong obtained her Ph.D degree in Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, Perception and Integrative neuroscience program. In her thesis, she worked with Dr. David C. Bradley to investigate the neural correlates of heading direction perception by extracellular recording neural activities of single neurons in dorsal medial superior temporal area (MSTd) in monkeys. At the same time, to gain more theoretical training, she enrolled in the Statistics Department for a Master’s degree and worked with Dr. Zhiyi Chi on developing an automatic classification model based on hidden Markov process for EEG waves recorded from sleeping birds. After obtaining her Ph.D from Chicago, she then joined Dr. Ning Qian’s lab at Columbia University to study face perception and adaptation collaborating with Dr. Peter Dayan from University College London. By using adaptation in a novel way, they are able to make inferences about the hierarchical processing of visual input in the cortex.
Education
2007 – Ph.D. Department of Psychology, the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
2005 – M.S. Department of Statistics, the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
2000 – B.S. Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing, China
Research Interests
- My research interest is to study visual perception by psychophysical experiments and electrophysiological/neural imaging studies; and further model the neural network system with known neural population activities. In particular, I am working on the following questions:
- Visual Perception
How do we visually perceive daily objects and activities (e.g. faces and motion) and how is the visual perception affected by our previous visual experience (adaptation and learning)?
- Human-computer interaction
What is the basis of effective design in visual displays? How does our visual system analyze large amounts of data/information in a short period of time? What kind of optimization process is involved? Furthermore, what is the role of attention and eye movement in this process?
- Computational modeling
How to model the hierarchical process in neural network? How does visual information transfer from low-level to high-level? How does the feedback system work synergistically?
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Wu J.*, Xu, H.*, Dayan P. and Qian N., The role of background statistics in face adaptation (submitted)
Xu H., Dayan P., Lipkin R. M., Qian N., Adaptation across the cortical hierarchy: low-level curve adaptation affects high-level facial-expression judgments,Journal of Neuroscience, Mar. 2008; 28: 3374-3383
Bradley D. C. , Troyk P. R. , Berg J. A., Bak M., Cogan S., Erickson R., Kufta C., Mascaro M., McCreery D., Schmidt E. M., Towle V. L., and Xu H. Visuotopic Mapping Through a Multichannel Stimulating Implant in Primate V1, Journal of Neurophysiology, Mar 2005; 93: 1659 - 1670.
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