Biography:Marlene Behrmann

Short description: American psychologist

Marlene Behrmann
Born	(1959-04-14) April 14, 1959
Alma mater	University of Witwatersrand (B.A., 1981) University of Witwatersrand (M.A., 1984) University of Toronto (Ph.D., 1991)
Scientific career
Fields	Psychology Neuroscience
Institutions	University of Toronto Weizmann Institute of Science Carnegie Mellon University

Marlene Behrmann (born April 14, 1959) is a Professor in the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh. She was previously a Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. She specializes in the cognitive neuroscience of visual perception, with a specific focus on object recognition.

Education

Marlene Behrmann was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, April 14, 1959. She received a B.A. in speech and hearing therapy from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1981; an M.A. in speech pathology from the University of Witwatersrand in 1984, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Toronto in 1991.

Career and research

From 1991 to 1993, Behrmann worked in the Departments of Psychology and Medicine of the University of Toronto, and in 1993, she accepted a position as a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, where she has remained since. She has also held an adjunct professorship in the Departments of Neuroscience and Communication Disorders at the University of Pittsburgh since 1994, and she has served as a Visiting Professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel in 2000-2001 and the University of Toronto in 2006–2007. Behrmann is a member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and the Neuroscience Institute.

Behrmann's research addresses a specific question: How does the brain assemble a meaningful and coherent interpretation of the sparse information received from the eyes? Widely considered to be a trailblazer and a worldwide leader in the field of visual cognition, Behrmann uses neuroimaging and psychophysics to study the human visual system in health and disease to answer this question.

Awards and honors

• 2015, elected member of the National Academy of Sciences
• 2019, member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Fellow, Society of Experimental Psychologists,
• Fellow, Cognitive Science Society
• Fellow, Cognitive Neuroscience Society

Representative papers

• Granovetter, M.C., Ettensohn, L., Robert, S and Behrmann, M. (2022). With Childhood Hemispherectomy, One Hemisphere Can Support--But is Suboptimal for--Word and Face Recognition, PNAS, 119(44):e2212936119. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2212936119. https://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.11.06.371823v1

• Liu, N., Behrmann, M., Turchi, J. N., Avidan, G., Hadj-Bouziane, F. and Ungerleider, L. (2022). Hierarchical organization of face patches in macaque cortex as revealed by fMRI and pharmacological inactivation, Nature Communication, 13(1):6787. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-34451-x.

• Blauch, N. M., Behrmann, M. and Plaut, D. C. (2022). A connectivity-constrained computational account of topographic organization in high-level visual cortex, PNAS, 119(3):e2112566119. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2112566119.

• Avidan G, Behrmann M. Spatial Integration in Normal Face Processing and Its Breakdown in Congenital Prosopagnosia. Annu Rev Vis Sci. 2021 Sep 15;7:301-321. doi: 10.1146/annurev-vision-113020-012740.

• Behrmann, Marlene; Avidan, Galia; Leonard, Grace Lee; Kimchi, Rutie; Luna, Beatriz; Humphreys, Kate; Minshew, Nancy (January 2006). "Configural processing in autism and its relationship to face processing" (in en). Neuropsychologia 44 (1): 110–129. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2005.04.002. PMID 15907952. 

• Behrmann, M.; Bub, D. (June 1992). "Surface dyslexia and dysgraphia: dual routes, single lexicon" (in en). Cognitive Neuropsychology 9 (3): 209–251. doi:10.1080/02643299208252059. ISSN 0264-3294. 

• Behrmann, Marlene; Geng, Joy J; Shomstein, Sarah (April 2004). "Parietal cortex and attention" (in en). Current Opinion in Neurobiology 14 (2): 212–217. doi:10.1016/j.conb.2004.03.012. PMID 15082327. https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/6617429. 

• Behrmann, Marlene; Winocur, Gordon; Moscovitch, Morris (October 1992). "Dissociation between mental imagery and object recognition in a brain-damaged patient" (in en). Nature 359 (6396): 636–637. doi:10.1038/359636a0. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 1406994. Bibcode: 1992Natur.359..636B. 

• Behrmann, Marlene; Zemel, Richard S.; Mozer, Michael C. (1998). "Object-based attention and occlusion: Evidence from normal participants and a computational model." (in en). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 24 (4): 1011–1036. doi:10.1037/0096-1523.24.4.1011. ISSN 1939-1277. PMID 9706708. 

External links

• Marlene Behrmann publications indexed by Google Scholar
• Marlene Behrmann's Biography - CMU Department of Psychology
• Marlene Behrmann's Cognitive Neuroscience Lab