Talia Konkle
Kempner Associate Faculty
Professor of Psychology
She/Her
Contact Information
Subjects I Teach:
- fMRI methods
- Biological and artificial vision systems
Areas I Research:
About
Talia Konkle, PhD is an Assistant Professor at Harvard University in the Department of Psychology and Center for Brain Science. Konkle completed her undergraduate studies at University of California Berkeley in Applied Math and Cognitive Science and her graduate studies at MIT in Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Konkle’s research focuses on the visual representation and the organization of the human visual system using a combination of computational, behavioral, and neuroimaging approaches.
Research Focus
Konkle’s current research focuses on vision, brain organization, and representation learning. She aims to understand how humans see and make sense of the visual world. How is it that simple patterns of light entering the eyes are transformed into meaning-filled representations of what we infer to be out there, like objects and agents in wider encompassing environments? In particular, her research seeks to characterize the perceptual and neural architecture underlying this visual intelligence— that is, to delineate the components of the visual system, and how they are organized, to construct these internal representations of what we see. She draws insights from considerations of ecological vision in a 3D physical world, and she leverages rapid advances in machine vision and deep learning to gain new computational insight into the pressures that shape visual representation.