Marlene Behrmann


Marlene Behrmann is a Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. She specializes in the cognitive neuroscience of visual perception, with a specific focus on object recognition.

Education

Marlene Behrmann was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, April 14, 1959. She received a B.A. in speech and hearing therapy from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1981; an M.A. in speech pathology from the University of Witwatersrand in 1984, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Toronto in 1991.

Career and research

From 1991 to 1993, Behrmann worked in the Departments of Psychology and Medicine of the University of Toronto, and in 1993, she accepted a position as a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, where she has remained since. She has also held an adjunct professorship in the Departments of Neuroscience and Communication Disorders at the University of Pittsburgh since 1994, and she has served as a Visiting Professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel in 2000-2001 and the University of Toronto in 2006–2007. Behrmann is a member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at CMU.
The major approach she uses in her research is to study the behavior of human adults who have sustained brain damage, which selectively affects their ability to carry out these processes. Behrmann also conducts rehabilitation studies with brain damaged subjects in order to treat the observed deficits, which also sheds light on the mechanisms underlying visual cognition.

Awards and honors

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