Ayse Pinar Saygin, PhD, Research Fellow
Institute of
Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London
Wellcome Trust Centre for Functional Neuroimaging,
University College London
Department of Optometry and Visual Science, City University
Starting summer 2009, I will take a position as
Assistant Professor in Cognitive Science and Neuroscience at the
University of California, San Diego. Enquiries from prospective students
are welcome!
Contact info:
17 Queen Square, WC1N 3AR London, United Kingdom
Phone: +44(0)2076795430 - E-mail: apsaygin (gmaildotcom)
I study how humans perceive, attend to, and understand biologically and socially significant objects and events in the world. An overarching goal is to form functional and structural links between domains (and brain areas) traditionally considered to be "low level", perceptual or sensorimotor and those that are considered "high level" or more complex (such as social cognition, language). I believe in interdisciplinary approaches and use multiple theoretical and experimental approaches to research questions.
Research Topics: Functional properties of cortical retinotopic maps in higher visual areas, esp. attentional modulation. Biological motion perception (neuropsychological, neuroimaging and psychophysics including multisensory studies). Perception of movements of android and robotic agents. Neuroimaging and neuropsychological methods. Language comprehension and relation to non-linguistic (visual, motor) brain areas. Also worked on artificial intelligence and the Turing Test.
Links to close collaborators
SELECTED PAPERS (Please
see CV for a complete list and pdfs)
Saygin, A.P. & Sereno, M.I. (in press). Retinotopy and attention
in human occipital, temporal, parietal and frontal cortex. Cerebral
Cortex.
Saygin, A.P., Driver, J., de Sa, V.R. (in press) In the footsteps
of biological motion and multisensory perception: Judgments of
audio-visual temporal relations are enhanced for upright walkers.
Psychological Science.
Saygin, A.P. (2007) Superior temporal and premotor brain areas
necessary for biological motion perception. Brain 130(9):
2452-61.
Dick, F., Saygin, A.P., Galati, G. Pitzalis, S, Bentrovalto, S. et
al. (2007) What is involved and what is necessary for complex linguistic
and non- linguistic auditory processing: evidence from fMRI and lesion
data. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 19(5): 799-816.
Hagler Jr, D.J., Saygin, A.P., & Sereno, M.I. (2006) Smoothing and
cluster thresholding for cortical surface-based group analysis of fMRI
data. Neuroimage 33: 1093-1103.
Saygin, A.P., Wilson, S.M., Hagler Jr., D.J., Bates, E., & Sereno,
M.I. (2004) Point-light biological
motion perception activates human premotor cortex. Journal of
Neuroscience, 24: 6181 - 6188.
Saygin, A.P., Wilson, S.M. Dronkers, N. & Bates, E. (2004) Action
comprehension in aphasia:
Linguistic and non-linguistic deficits and their lesion correlates.
Neuropsychologia, 42: 1788-1804.
Wilson, S.M., Saygin, A.P., Sereno, M.I., Iacoboni, M. (2004).
Listening to speech activates motor areas involved in speech production.
Nature Neuroscience, 7: 701 - 702.
Bates, E., Wilson, S.M., Saygin, A.P., Dick, F., Sereno, M.I.,
Knight, R., Dronkers, N. (2003). Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping.
Nature Neuroscience, 6(5), 448-450.
Saygin, A.P., Dick, F., Wilson, S.M., Dronkers, N.F. & Bates, E.
(2003) Neural resources for processing language and environmental sounds:
Evidence from aphasia. Brain, 126(4), 928-945.
Wilson, S.M. & Saygin, A.P. (2003). Grammaticality judgment in
aphasia: Deficits are not specific to syntactic structures, aphasic
syndromes or lesion sites. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience,
16(2), 238-252.
Turing Test Papers
Saygin, A.P. & Cicekli, I. (2002) Pragmatics in human-computer
conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 34(3), 227-258.
Saygin, A.P., Cicekli, I., & Akman, V. (2000) Turing Test: 50
years later. Minds and Machines, 10(4), 463-518. [download]
Research
CV
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