Arash Yazdanbakhsh CELEST Neon Color Spreading syn fire chains dynamical systems surface perception Munker White illusion lines perceptual grouping modeling visual cortex fast synchronization laminar cortical circuits

Arash Yazdanbakhsh, MD, PhD

Boston University

Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems

677 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02215

Email: y a z d a n @ b u . e d u

I received my M.D. degree in Tehran Medical University. During my medical study and practice, I followed my interest in neuroscience with my high school and medical classmates.

We self organized weekly lectures which were mainly related to vision in the building of our high school NODET (National Organization for Developing Exceptional Talents). As a practice, we decided to write our first paper, which was about a visual psychophysics experiment. That was published in the Brain and Cognition journal:

Arash Fazl, Farshad Moradi, S.Reza Afraz, Arash Yazdanbakhsh (1998).

Do hemispheres specialize in processing different aspects of visual stimulus? Brain and Cognition, 37/1

Current Researches

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Brain & Dynamical Systems

Neon Color Spreading

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Surface Perception

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Modeling of Visual Cortex

Becoming more interested in the specific topics, under the supervision of Professor Rouhani from the physics department of Sharif University and Professor Abbassian from the mathematics department, we concentrated on a specific feed forward neural network model and published the following article in the Biological Cybernetics:

Yazdanbakhsh A., Babadi B., Rouhani S., Arabzadeh E., Abbassian A. (2002).

New attractor states for synchronous activity in syn fire chains with excitatory and inhibitory coupling, Biological Cybernetics, 86: 367 –378

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At the same time we also followed our interest in vision psychophysics, especially the ones containing illusions. During this time, we got useful comments from (ordered alphabetically) Stephen Grossberg, Piers Howe, Ennio Mingolla and Faramarz Valafar and published the following article in Perception:

Arash Yazdanbakhsh, Ehsan Arabzadeh, Baktash Babadi, Arash Fazl (2002)

Münker-White-like illusions without T-junctions, Perception, 31: 711 - 715

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Interest in psychophysics, lead to interest in surface percept and designing a fun experiment about the depth of an illusory surface with Professor Takeo Watanabe, which is published in Vision Research:

Arash Yazdanbakhsh, Takeo Watanabe (2004).

Asymmetry between horizontal and vertical illusory lines in determining the depth of their embedded surface, Vision Research 44(22):2621-7

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Working on laminar model of cortex under the supervision of Professor Stephen Grossberg with regard to perceptual grouping lead to the following publication in Neural Networks:

Arash Yazdanbakhsh, Stephen Grossberg (2004).

Fast synchronization of perceptual grouping in laminar visual cortical circuits, Neural Networks 17: 707–718

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