The António Champalimaud Vision 2024 Prize honours four foreign neuroscientists with their work on facial, shape and colour recognition, the foundation that institutes the prize, worth one million euros, announced on Wednesday.
Margaret Livingstone, Nancy Kanwisher and Doris Tsao (United States) and Winrich Freiwald (Germany) are the winners of this year’s edition of the “highest award in the field of vision”, the Champalimaud Foundation announced in a statement, highlighting that the research carried out by scientists “has allowed significant advances in the field of visual neuroscience”.
Neuroscientist Margaret Livingstone of Harvard University has shown that the first areas of the brain that process what people see “are organized into separate parts, specializing in color, shape, motion, and depth.”
“Everything we perceive, through all our senses, is just patterns of neurons [células do sistema nervoso] that fire in the brain. Different parts of the brain represent different sensory modalities or different aspects of a sensory modality,” he told Lusa.
Nancy Kanwisher, Doris Tsao and Winrich Freiwald “discovered a system of brain areas that are critical for recognizing faces.”
Their research “allowed us to understand how the brain processes facial features, from initial recognition to the identification of the person, regardless of their posture,” as well as to identify specific neural mechanisms “responsible for encoding various facial features, deciphering the structure that the brain uses to recognize faces.”
The António Champalimaud Vision Award is given annually, and in even-numbered years it “recognizes major advances in research in the area of vision and/or vision restoration” and in odd-numbered years it “recognizes organizations that stand out in the fight against blindness and vision problems.”
The jury is chaired by American ophthalmologist and epidemiologist Alfred Sommer. The prize is named after Portuguese industrialist António Champalimaud (1918-2004), who left the creation of the Champalimaud Foundation in his will and died blind and suffering from cancer, one of the diseases studied at the institution’s research centre.
Source: Observadora
