Maggie Henderson

Cognitive computational neuroscientist

Picture of Maggie

About

Update: In September 2024, I will start as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at Carnegie Mellon University, with a courtesy appointment in the Neuroscience Institute.

See my lab website for more details.

Prior to this, I was a postdoc at CMU, working with Leila Wehbe and Michael Tarr. Before that, I earned my B.S. in Biological Sciences from Cornell University, then obtained my Ph.D. in Neurosciences from the University of California, San Diego, where I worked with John Serences.

My research focuses on human visual perception. My goal is to understand how our visual perception reflects the structure of the world we live in as well as our need for adaptive everyday behavior. How do we compute meaningful, high-level information from noisy visual inputs, taking into account our experience with the statistics of our environment? How do we adapt these representations to changes in our goals and internal state? To address these questions, I use experimental techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and behavioral studies performed with healthy human participants. I also use computational approaches, including modeling applied to fMRI and behavioral data as well as in-silico experiments in artificial neural network models.

View my full CV here and a recent research statement here.

Pre-prints & under review

Zawar, R., Dewan, S., Luo, A.F., Henderson, M.M., Tarr, M.J, & Wehbe, L. (2024). StableSemantics: A Synthetic Language-Vision Dataset of Semantic Representations in Naturalistic Images. arXiv; under review.

Yeung, J., Luo, A.F, Sarch, G., Henderson, M.M., Ramanan, D., & Tarr, M.J. (2024). Neural Representations of Dynamic Visual Stimuli. arXiv; under review.

Henderson, M.M., Serences, J.T., & Rungratsameetaweemana, N. (2023). Dynamic categorization rules alter representations in human visual cortex. bioRxiv; under review.

Luo, A.F., Wehbe, L., Tarr, M.J., & Henderson, M.M. (2023). Neural Selectivity for Real-World Object Size in Natural Images. bioRxiv; under review.

Peer-reviewed publications

Luo, A.F., Henderson, M.M., Tarr, M.J, & Wehbe, L. (2024). BrainSCUBA: Fine-Grained Natural Language Captions of Visual Cortex Selectivity. Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).

Luo, A.F., Henderson, M.M., Wehbe, L., & Tarr, M.J. (2023). Brain Diffusion for Visual Exploration: Cortical Discovery using Large Scale Generative Models. Proceedings of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS); oral presentation.

Henderson, M.M., Tarr, M.J., & Wehbe, L. (2023). A texture statistics encoding model reveals hierarchical feature selectivity across human visual cortex. Journal of Neuroscience. (pdf)

Henderson, M.M., Tarr, M.J., & Wehbe, L. (2023). Low-level tuning biases in higher visual cortex reflect the semantic informativeness of visual features. Journal of Vision. (pdf)

Jain, N., Wang, A., Henderson, M.M., Lin, R., Prince, J.S., Tarr, M.J., & Wehbe, L. (2023). Selectivity for food in human ventral visual cortex. Communications Biology. (pdf)

Jinsi, O.* , Henderson, M.M.*, & Tarr, M.J. (2023). Early experience with low-pass filtered images facilitates visual category learning in a neural network model. PLOS ONE. (pdf)

Henderson, M.M., Rademaker, R.L., & Serences, J.T. (2022). Flexible utilization of spatial- and motor-based codes for the storage of visuo-spatial information. eLife. (pdf)

Henderson, M.M., & Serences, J.T. (2021). Biased orientation representations can be explained by experience with non-uniform training set statistics. Journal of Vision. (pdf)

Henderson, M.M.* , Vo, V.A.* , Chunharas, C., Sprague, T.C., & Serences, J.T. (2019). Multivariate analysis of BOLD activation patterns recovers graded depth representations in human visual and parietal cortex. eNeuro. (pdf)

Henderson, M.M. & Serences, J.T. (2019). Human frontoparietal cortex represents behaviorally relevant target status based on abstract object features. Journal of Neurophysiology. (pdf)

*These authors made equal contributions.

Contact

Email

mmhender [at] cmu [dot] edu

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