Marisa Carrasco
New York University
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Primary Section: 52, Psychological and Cognitive Sciences Secondary Section: 28, Systems Neuroscience Membership Type:
International Member
(elected 2021)
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Biosketch
Marisa Carrasco is a Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science and Collegiate Professor at New York University. She is a cognitive neuroscientist who uses human psychophysics, neuroimaging, neurostimulation and computational modeling to investigate the relation between brain and behavior and is particularly recognized for her work in visual perception and attention. Her research has revealed how attention modulates perceptual performance and alters appearance in a variety of visual tasks.
Carrasco was born and grew up in Mexico City and earned her Licentiate in Psychology, specializing in experimental psychology, from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Psychology (Cognition and Perception) from Princeton University. She joined the faculty of Wesleyan University where she received an NSF Young Investigator Award and an American Association of University Women Fellowship. She joined NYU in 1995 where she chaired the Psychology Department. She has been president of the Vision Sciences Society and of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.
Carrasco is a Fellow of the American Psychological Society and the Society of Experimental Psychologists and has received many awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Cattell Fellowship, the Davida Teller Award (Vision Sciences Society) and the Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences (CMU). She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Research Interests
Throughout her career, Carrasco has been interested in visual perception and how attention shapes perception. Together with her lab members and colleagues she has investigated with complementary techniques –including psychophysics, neuroimaging, neurostimulation and neural modeling– how attention shapes perception, improves performance in a variety of visual tasks, and even alters the appearance of information across the visual field. In collaboration with others, Carrasco has expanded her research on visual perception and attention to include people diagnosed with neuropsychological conditions in which attention is compromised –attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD)– to better characterize these deficits, and people with visual deficits –due to amblyopia or cortical blindness– for visual rehabilitation purposes.
Carrasco’s studies with converging methods and with intact and specialized populations have revealed how attention fundamentally shapes perception across the visual field, and how it improves perceptual learning and influences visually-guided decisions and behavior. As remarkable as the human visual system is, we are all inevitably limited by both bandwidth and processing power. Linking brain and behavior, Carrasco’s research has advanced our understanding of how crucial visual attention is in optimizing the system’s limited capacity to shape our perception of the visual world.
