Draft:Marius Peelen

Marius Peelen
Born	Marius Peelen 1979
Alma mater	University of Wales, Bangor, UK
Scientific career
Fields	Cognitive Neuroscientist Cognition
Institutions	Donders Institute
Thesis	"Body selectivity in human visual cortex" (2008)
Doctoral advisor	Prof. Paul Downing
Website	https://www.peelenlab.nl/lab-members

Marius V. Peelen is a neuroscience researcher specializing in how the brain perceives objects and scenes, focusing on activity in the visual cortex. He employs a variety of behavioral and neuroimaging methods, including functional MRI (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). His research examines how perceptual processes are shaped by experience, attention, memory, and expectation. Peelen’s work has shown how cognitive states modulate visual cortex activity, revealing how the brain efficiently converts complex sensory input into meaningful object representations. He is credited with identifying the Fusiform Body Area in the fusiform gyrus, which was previously believed to be involved selectively in identifying human faces (Fusiform Face Area).

Education and early life

Marius Peelen earned his MA in Cognitive Psychology from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 2003, under the supervision of Dr. D. Heslenfeld and Prof. J. Theeuwes. He then pursued a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Wales, Bangor, UK, completing it in 2006 under the supervision of Prof. P. Downing. His PhD thesis “Body selectivity in human visual cortex” showed that perceiving other people involves rapidly identifying their identity, actions, and emotions through facial and body cues. While faces are crucial for recognizing identity, bodies are more significant for action recognition, particularly when facial details are obscured. Using fMRI, he revealed a previously unknown body-selective visual area overlapping a face-selective area and demonstrated that these areas can be functionally separated. Additionally, he showed that visual body-selective areas lack a dynamic representation of observed actions, unlike frontal and parietal action-recognition areas.

Career and research

Marius Peelen is a researcher in the field of cognitive neuroscience. He began his academic career as a Teaching Assistant at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, from 2001 to 2003. He then held several post-doctoral positions: at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, under the supervision of Prof. P. Vuilleumier (2006-2007); Princeton University, USA, under the supervision of Prof. S. Kastner (2007-2009); and at both Harvard University, USA, and the University of Trento, Italy, under the supervision of Prof. A. Caramazza (2009-2011). From 2011 to 2016, Peelen served as a Principal Investigator and Assistant Professor at the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC) at the University of Trento, Italy. He then took on the role of Instructor at Harvard Summer School, Harvard University, USA, from 2014 to 2015. Following this, he was an Associate Professor (tenured) at CIMeC, University of Trento, Italy, from 2016 to 2017.

Marius Peelen is known for his pioneering work in the identification and study of the Fusiform Body Area (FBA), a brain region involved in the visual processing of human bodies. In 2004, Peelen, along with Paul Downing, identified the FBA through an fMRI study, challenging the prevailing notion that the fusiform gyrus was exclusively involved in face perception. Their research demonstrated that the FBA is selectively responsive to bodies, distinguishing it from the Fusiform Face Area (FFA) and the Extrastriate Body Area (EBA), which are involved in face perception and body part recognition, respectively. This discovery was further elaborated upon in a 2005 study by Rebecca Schwarzlose and her team, who named this brain region the Fusiform Body Area.

In 2017, Peelen received the Consolidator grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for “Characterizing neural mechanisms underlying the efficiency of naturalistic vision”. In the same year, he moved to the Donders Institute, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where he has been a Principal Investigator ever since. In March 2024, Marius Peelen received the Vici grant given by NWO (The Dutch Research Council). In the same month, he was appointed professor of Visual and cognitive neuroscience at Radboud University.

He is also an active editor at eLife and Science Advances.

Public engagement

Marius Peelen delivered a talk in 2022 at the Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Brain Imaging at Ohio State University, focusing on the neural mechanisms of context-based object recognition. In his presentation, he discussed how objects could be recognized based on local visual features such as shape, colour, and texture. However, these features are often not visible in daily life due to factors like peripheral vision, clutter, or distance. Peelen's research demonstrates that object recognition remains highly accurate under these challenging conditions when objects are seen within their typical scene context. His findings reveal that expectations derived from scene context, processed in the scene-selective cortex, help to clarify object representations in the object-selective visual cortex, enabling accurate recognition even when local features are not discernible.

Peelen was featured in the New York Times in an article about how the brain processes and organizes the vast amount of sensory information it receives. Here, he is quoted about how the visual system can be primed to detect particular categories of objects, resulting in people processing visual information at different speeds. Peelen is also mentioned in a Scientific American article about the differential processing of inanimate and animate objects in the visual cortex. In Le Scienze, the Italian edition of Scientific American, he explains how the medial prefrontal cortex and the left superior temporal sulcus might be important for grasping and categorizing other people's emotions.

Teaching

Marius Peelen began his teaching career at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, where he lectured on Introductory Mathematics as a teaching assistant and lecturer from 2000 to 2003. He was later an assistant professor at CIMeC at the University of Trento, from 2012 to 2017. In 2014-2015, Peelen coordinated "The Social Brain" course at Harvard Summer School. Since 2017, he has been teaching at Radboud University, coordinating several courses and supervising students as an Associate Professor and then, from 2024, as Full Professor of Visual and Cognitive Neuroscience.

Representative Publications

Peelen, Marius V.; Berlot, Eva; de Lange, Floris P. (2023-11-23). "Predictive processing of scenes and objects". Nature Reviews Psychology. 3 (1): 13–26. doi:10.1038/s44159-023-00254-0. ISSN 2731-0574. PMC 7616164. PMID 38989004.

Peelen, Marius V.; Downing, Paul E. (2023-08-17). "Testing cognitive theories with multivariate pattern analysis of neuroimaging data". Nature Human Behaviour. 7 (9): 1430–1441. doi:10.1038/s41562-023-01680-z. ISSN 2397-3374. PMC 7616245. PMID 37591984.

Peelen, Marius V.; Fei-Fei, Li; Kastner, Sabine (2009). "Neural mechanisms of rapid natural scene categorization in human visual cortex". Nature. 460 (7251): 94–97. Bibcode:2009Natur.460...94P. doi:10.1038/nature08103. ISSN 0028-0836. PMC 2752739. PMID 19506558.

Peelen, Marius V.; Downing, Paul E. (2007). "The neural basis of visual body perception". Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 8 (8): 636–648. doi:10.1038/nrn2195. ISSN 1471-003X. PMID 17643089.

Peelen, Marius V.; Wiggett, Alison J.; Downing, Paul E. (2006). "Patterns of fMRI Activity Dissociate Overlapping Functional Brain Areas that Respond to Biological Motion". Neuron. 49 (6): 815–822. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2006.02.004. PMID 16543130.