Gideon Caplovitz
Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Ph.D., Psychology, Dartmouth College Gideon Caplovitz came to Nevada from Philadelphia after completing a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute of Princeton University. During his fellowship, he applied functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to the study of visual awareness. By presenting observers with specially crafted visual images and simultaneously recording their brain activity, he was able to measure and characterize neural responses specific to the conscious-subjective experiences the observers had of those images. Furthermore, he was able to dissociate them from neural responses that were present even when the observer did not ‘see’ the images. At Dartmouth, Dr. Caplovitz combined classic psychophysical methods with modern fMRI techniques to investigate how humans perceive the motions and shapes of objects in the world around us. In his dissertation, he discovered a close relationship between the shape of an object and the speed with which it is perceived to move. Prior to obtaining his Ph.D., Dr. Caplovitz earned an MS in mathematics from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and NYU, where he specialized in digital signal processing. He then spent over four years applying these skills to the analysis of electroencephalography (EEG) data at the Abratech Corporation. As part of his technical training, he completed internships at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (SONAR analysis), ATT& Bell Laboratories (Speech Recognition) and Lucent Technologies (Network Traffic Flow). At Nevada Dr. Caplovitz continues his research characterizing what we see and identifying the neural processes that mediate our subjective experience of the world around us. He places a strong emphasis on conducting objective, ethical and rigorous empirical research and is bringing this emphasis to the classroom through an undergraduate course on Experimental Psychology and a graduate course on Statistical Methods. Read more about Gideon Caplovitz at: http://www.unr.edu/cla/psych/caplovitz.html |