Foundation Honors Desimone for Research Identifying Neural Mechanisms of Visual Attention, Visual Memory

BERKELEY, CA -- Dr. Robert Desimone, chief of the Section on Behavioral Neurophysiology in the Laboratory of Neuropsychology at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland, has won the 1994 Golden Brain Award from the Minerva Foundation for research that has identified mechanisms for visual attention and visual memory in the brain.

Desimone is the tenth recipient of the Golden Brain Award, presented annually by the Berkeley-based Minerva Foundation for exceptional basic research on vision and the brain. He will be honored at a dinner on Wednesday, November 16, in Miami, Florida, where he will be attending a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

Announcing Desimone's selection, Minerva Foundation Executive Officer Elwin Marg said, "We are learning more each day about how the brain functions, but one of the functions that still remains enshrouded in mystery is memory. Robert Desimone has provided new insight by successfully demonstrating that visual memory and visual attention occur in certain neurons (cells) in the brain and by documenting the activities of these neurons."

In his earlier work, Desimone collaborated with Dr. Leslie Ungerleider, also of NIMH, to define and locate the visual processing areas in the brain. He now examines the activities of individual neurons, gathering data recorded from monkeys doing behavioral tasks that require them to remember visual images.

"From the recordings of these neurons, we are constructing a sort of functional wiring diagram of attention and memory showing what steps the information goes through that results in things being attended to and remembered," Desimone said.

Desimone and his team of post-doctoral fellows have identified some of the basic neural processes that appear to be necessary for short- and long-term memory.

"One of the mechanisms we've found is that neurons automatically extract from the current visual scene the things that are new. For example, if someone you had never seen before walked into your office, you would automatically recognize that this person was new. As a result of seeing this new image, the neurons change permanently in terms of how they process any further information about that person," Desimone said.

Desimone has also identified the neural mechanism underlying working memory in the brain, demonstrating that individual neurons actively maintain visual information in the brain, holding it "on-line" for short-term recall.

Looking to the future, Desimone would like to study what occurs at the synapses--the parts of the brain where neurons communicate with each other. He also wants to learn how the brain functions at the level of large neural populations, and he would like to apply some of his work to understanding more directly how the human brain functions.

Ultimately, he hopes, his basic research on the mechanisms of attention and memory will contribute to clinical research that will be used to treat mental diseases like schizophrenia and depression and brain damage from trauma.

Desimone, 42, earned a BA in psychology from Macalester College in 1974 and a PhD in Psychology/Neuroscience from Princeton University in 1979. In 1990, he was honored with the Troland Prize of the National Academy of Sciences for "outstanding work on the cortical and subcortical neuronal mechanisms underlying visual perception and attention."

The Minerva Foundation was established in 1984 to promote basic research on vision and the brain. The foundation presents the Golden Brain Award annually to honor researchers who are making fundamental breakthroughs that extend our knowledge of vision and the brain and expand our understanding of important physiological functions.

Past recipients of the award are William Newsome and Denis Baylor of Stanford University; Robert Wurtz of the National Eye Institute in Bethesda, MD; John Allman of the California Institute of Technology; Rudiger von der Heydt, Jeremy Nathans and Gian Poggio of The Johns Hopkins University; David Sparks of the University of Pennsylvania; and Semir Zeki of University College, London.