Vishal Kapoor

Alumni Department Physiology of Cognitive Processes

Main Focus

    One of the most enigmatic and arguably the hardest problems in neuroscience is to understand the biological basis of consciousness. Conscious visual perception has been postulated as a favorable form of consciousness to study, and considerable research has been directed towards its scientific investigation. While much is known about functional specialization pertaining to individual regions of the primate visual system, how this neural machinery together realizes perception or conscious awareness of the visual input remains to be understood. Evidently, scrutinizing this neural machinery, which gives rise to visual perception, could also provide insights into a more general understanding of awareness itself.

      Unravelling the neural correlates of conscious perception is a major focus of my research. We investigate this in the visual system of primates, while they participate in psychophysical paradigms, capable of disentangling sensory input from subjective perception. To this end, we probe regions of the brain with multi-electrode arrays to investigate the relationship of neural activity to subjective perception at both a microscopic (single neuron) as well as a mesoscopic scale (local field potential).

Curriculum Vitae

    Dr. Vishal Kapoor is a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. He was awarded his PhD in Neuroscience from the Faculty of Science and Faculty of Medicine at the University of Tuebingen, Germany for his research on the role of prefrontal cortex in conscious visual perception. His pre-doctoral education includes a master’s degree in neuroscience from the National Brain Research Centre, Gurgaon, India and a bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology from Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi, India.  

Go to Editor View