What happens in our brains when we see a picture or hear a sound? The truth is that we don't really know. If we understood these processes, we would be able to build machines that could do the sorts of things that humans are capable of. But our best computers cannot perform even the simplest tasks that we do effortlessly every day, such as recognizing a face in a crowd or understanding what a person is saying in a room full of people talking.

The PCN lab, led by Dr. Michael Pratte, is part of the Psychology Department and the Institute for Imaging and Analytical Technologies at Mississippi State Univeristy. We study human behavior and brain activity, in an effort to better understand how the human brain is so good at perceiving, remembering, and later recognizing information in the world.