2021 Banners Troland Rust
Nicole Rust, University of Pennsylvania, received a 2021 Troland Research Award.
Rust has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of how the cortex makes use of complex visual information to guide intelligent behavior. This achievement revolutionizes how we think about neural representation in inferotemporal cortex, providing significant new understanding of the relationship between visual perception and visual memory. Her work brings together multiple levels of comprehension about how the human brain stores and processes visual information in decision-making and intelligent reasoning.
Her groundbreaking research includes a focus on algorithmic investigation of the brain's learning rules and how neurons signal visual memory percepts. A complementary emphasis addresses understanding how visual and visual memory signals are configured such that the same neural populations can drive both visual and visual memory behavior.
By focusing on single unit activity in the neural signals of the primate visual system, her work has pushed the field forward both in providing new insights about how neural signals throughout the visual system inform specific capabilities, and about how the advancement of population-based analysis and computational tools can be applied to other brain areas and activities.
Two Troland Research Awards of $75,000 are given annually to recognize unusual achievement by early-career researchers (preferably 45 years of age or younger) and to further empirical research within the broad spectrum of experimental psychology. The Troland Research Award was established by a trust created in 1931 by the bequest of Leonard T. Troland.
