Neurobiologist & Author
A professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Livingstone is best known for her work on visual processing. Her work has led to a deeper understanding of how we see color, motion, and depth, and how these processes are involved in generating percepts of objects as distinct from their background.
Her book, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing, illustrates insights in the world of visual art, including an explanation for the elusive quality of the Mona Lisa’s smile (it is more visible to peripheral vision than to central vision) and that Rembrandt, like many artists, may have been stereoblind.
Early on she explored whether visual processing in general is parallel, with each subdivision processing different kinds of visual information. These techniques are now widely used to explore parallel visual processing in humans and these findings on the parallel organization of the visual system provided a deep structure for linking a large body of perceptual and physiological work, and this idea has had a profound impact on both fields.
In collaboration with Albert Galaburda’s laboratory, Livingston’s research on the differences in visual processing in subjects with dyslexia has had a broad impact in the learning-disability field.