Vanderbilt Kennedy Center Lecture on Development and Developmental Disabilities: "Visual Perception in Autism: Circuit-Level to Real-World Insights"
Caroline Robertson, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College
Thursday, Apr. 11, 2024, 4:10-5:10 p.m. CT
OMC 241, Vanderbilt Kennedy Center/One Magnolia Circle Building and online
Differences in sensory processing are near-universal among individuals with autism, suggesting that both social and sensory traits are core characteristics of the condition. Yet, beyond questionnaire-based evidence that social and sensory traits are correlated, little is known about their causal connection.What neurobiological alterations might underpin differences in processes as disparate as social cognition and visual perception? How do sensory and social processing demands interact in everyday, real-world environments? This talk will present psychophysical, neuroimaging, and naturalistic studies of visual perception in autism.
About the Speaker: Dr. Caroline Robertson is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth. Her research uses cognitive neuroscience approaches to understand memory, perception, and neurodiversity. Dr. Robertson received her B.A. from Columbia University, where she studied neuroscience and philosophy. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where she trained as a Gates-Cambridge Scholar and an NIH-Cambridge Fellow with Dr. Chris I Baker (National Institutes of Health) and Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen (Cambridge). She performed her postdoctoral research at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT with Dr. Nancy Kanwisher. In 2013, Dr. Robertson was elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow. She has been named a NARSAD Young Investigator of the Brain and Behavior Foundation (2015), a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (2016), and an NSF CAREER Awardee (2022).
For more information, call (615) 322-8240.