Winrich Freiwald: The Dual Face on the Networks of Facial Perception and Movement

Laboratory of Neural Systems, The Rockefeller University

Humans, like all primates, take great interest in faces. Faces, by structure and dynamics, display a plethora of social information for a visual system that can extract it. The primate visual system does this through specialized hardware. The functional organization of this hardware, a network of tightly interconnected areas packed with face cells, each tuned to a different dimension of facial information, provides us with a unique model system to understand the computational principles and neural mechanisms of visual object recognition. Yet among objects faces are special: faces are more than passive displays of social information, they are active agents: they evoke emotions, activate memories, invoke thoughts about others’ mental states, draw and direct attention, and elicit communicative reactions in the perceiver. Faces trigger these processes in an automatic fashion, suggesting that these diverse cognitive functions may be supported by specialized hardware as well. In my talk, I will describe how the face-processing system encodes and transforms facial information. I will then discuss how the network is embedded in the social brain in ways suggesting specific pathways for social information processing supporting person knowledge, high-level social cognition, and the generation of emotions and facial movements.

 

Bio: Winrich Freiwald is head of the Laboratory of Neural Systems at the Rockefeller University in New York. He received his Ph.D. from Tübingen University in 1998 for work performed at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany. In following years, he was a lecturer at the University of Bremen, a research scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, as well as a fellow at the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study in Delmenhorst. Before starting his group at the Rockefeller University in 2010, he started and headed the primate brain imaging group at Bremen University and spent a sabbatical at California Institute of Technology. He won the 2010 Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award in the Neurosciences, was a 2011 McKnight Scholar and a 2013 New York Stem Cell Foundation Robertson Neuroscience Investigator. He received a 2016 W. Alden Spencer Award from Columbia University, a 2017 Distinguished Teaching Award from the Rockefeller University and a 2018 Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize. https://www.rockefeller.edu/our-scientists/heads-of-laboratories/974-winrich-freiwald/

 

Guests are welcome

Organized by

Henning Sprekeler

Location

BCCN Berlin, lecture hall, Philippstr. 13 Haus 6, 10115 Berlin