Brian Russ
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Research Interests
I am interested in the neural and behavioral mechanisms involved in higher-order cognitive processes, particularly those related to social cognition. My career goal is to explore how animals use social information to guide behavior, and to characterize the neural circuitry critical for processing this information. Towards this aim, in graduate school I studied how neurons in the ventral, non-spatial, auditory processing stream of rhesus macaques responded to communications signals. Following my graduate work, I began a post-doctoral fellowship investigating how rhesus macaques recognize and respond to possession cues. Recently, I began a new post-doctoral fellowship at NIMH studying which regions of the cortex are involved in perceptual switching between competing visual stimuli. To do this we use fMRI, single and multi unit recording, and neural inactivation in rhesus macaques while they view bistable patterns. In addition to these studies we have begun to investigate the functional correlation of spontaneous activity fluctuations across the macaque brain, with a focus on socially relevant circuits.