John Pyles

Research

As the Associate Director of the new Center for Human Neuroscience, I run the CHN-MRI facility and advise researchers on how they can best use MRI for their research. I also have a strong interest in MRI facility quality assurance, and standards and methods for open science in neuroimaging.

My own research focuses on how the brain perceives, processes and utilizes dynamic visual information. On a basic level I'm interested in how the brain can recognize and encode objects across motion and changes in shape from articulation. My work also focuses on the critical social information conveyed from the motion of human bodies and faces. How do we understand from motion how someone is happy or sad? How can we tell something is alive?

To answer these questions I use behavioral and neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI and diffusion imaging, and well as machine learning approaches in analysis of neuroimaging data. I collaborate with colleagues at UW, Univ. of California, Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University, and elsewhere.