Puneeth Chakravarthula

Biography

I am currently a 5th year PhD student in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences. As an undergraduate, I developed a deep interest in biological signals and neural computation through my work on a control systems project aimed at improving training efficiency and reliability of EMG-controlled prostheses. After graduation, I studied visual object recognition in humans for three years under the guidance of Dr. S.P. Arun at the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore. My work with Dr. Arun encompassed a variety of visual recognition problems, including visual search asymmetries, face category learning and memorability, dissimilarity measures and their use in characterizing perceptual spaces, and neuronal coding of object permanence, occlusion, and shadows.

In my free time, I enjoy hiking, cooking, playing ping pong and the piano. I hail from the historic city of Hyderabad, a cultural hub in India famous for its Biryani (a spicy rice dish). I love to discuss philosophy, science and technology. If you have something interesting to share with me, feel free to reach out to me through email or stop by the lab.

Research

Currently, my work focuses on understanding the computational processes underlying face recognition. Specifically, I study how different parts (i.e., features) of the face are combined to give us a unified face percept, and ask whether these same computations are used to encode other objects or if they are specialized only for faces. Eventually, my goal is to find an explanation for how various face-specific behavioral (and potentially neuronal) signatures arise in humans (e.g., the much greater difficulty we have recognizing upside-down faces compared to upside-down objects).