Affiliation: Augusta University, Medical College of Georgia

Dr. Jay Hegdé is a computational neuroscientist who is interested in understanding how the brain works. His research focuses on understanding the brain systems for visual cognition and visually guided action, because these are excellent model systems for studying brain function at large.

Dr. Hegdé is especially interested in understanding perception as inference, based on probabilistic reasoning or on heuristic judgment and decision-making (or mental ‘rules of thumb’).

His doctoral work focused on the molecular biology of fruit development. He transitioned to vision research as a post-doctoral fellow. His post-doctoral work focused on a diverse array of topics in vision research, including systems neurophysiology of object perception, high-level perception of visual scenes, visual motion perception, 3D vision, visual perceptual learning, and functional organization of the visual system. This work utilized many different experimental techniques, including neurophysiological recording in awake, behaving monkeys, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in human subjects, visual psychophysics in monkeys and humans, and neuroanatomy and cell biology of the visual system.

Dr. Hegdé’s current work focuses on visual perception and visually guided action under real-world conditions, such as camouflage-breaking, invariant object recognition, and medical image perception. His laboratory also studies neural mechanisms of cross-modal (or multisensory) perception, cross-modal perceptual learning, visual impairments, and the rehabilitation visual impairments.

Dr. Hegdé has enjoyed a long and productive collaboration in vision research with Dr. Bart, a co-editor of this issue. Dr. Saul, another co-editor of this issue, is a cherished fellow vision researcher of Dr. Hegdé’s at Augusta University.