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Cheryl Olman, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology E-mail: caolman@umn.edu Lab Website: http://vision.psych.umn.edu/~caolman

Research Interests:

My joint appointment in the departments of Psychology and Radiology reflects the division of my research interests. Employing a combination of visual psychophysics and fMRI, I want to determine how detection of local image features interacts with scene perception. How are local features in an image selected and grouped to construct a mental representation of a scene or object? To what extent do internal templates determine feature selection and shape perception?

I also spend time investigating the linkage between what BOLD fMRI measures (changes in blood oxygenation) and what we want to know (the underlying neural activity). Is it the input or the output of a visual area that drives the blood flow response? Are excitation and inhibition always balanced, or can inhibition drive the BOLD response as well as excitation? How do spatial characteristics of vascular regulation distort our view of spatially distributed neural activity?

Selected Publications:

Olman CA, Inati S, Heeger DH (2007). Large veins effects in spatial localization with 3T GE BOLD:displacement, not blurring. NeuroImage, 34:1126-1135.

Murray SO, Olman CA, Kersten DJ (2006). Spatially specific fMRI repetition effects in human visual cortex. J Neurophysiology, 95(4):2439-2445.

Olman CA, Kersten DJ (2004). Classification objects, ideal observers & generative models. Cognitive Science 28:227-239.

Olman CA, Schrater P, Ugurbil K, and Kersten DJ (2004). BOLD fMRI and psychophysical measurements of contrast response to broadband images. Vision Research 44:669-683.

Kim D-S, Ronen I, Olman C, Kim SG, Ugurbil K, Toth LJ (2004). Spatial relationship between neuronal activity and BOLD functional MRI. NeuroImage 21(3):876-85.

Olman CA, Ronen I, Ugurbil K, Kim D-S (2003). Retinotopic mapping in cat visual cortex using high field functional magnetic resonance imaging. Journal of Neuroscience Methods 131:161-170.