Prof. Kanwisher is a pioneer in the use of functional MRI (fMRI) and other techniques to pinpoint regions of the brain’s cortex that are specific cognitive tasks such as the perception of faces, places, bodies, and words. Kanwisher has written that she is interested in big questions like: “How are objects, faces, and scenes represented in the brain, and (how) do the representations of each of these classes of stimuli differ from each other? How are visual representations affected by attention, awareness, and experience? Which mental processes get their own special patch of cortex, why is it these processes and (apparently) not others, and how do special-purpose bits of brain arise in the first place?”

Kanwisher's findings have made her into a strong “localizationist,” a proponent of the idea that specific high-level cognitive processes are handled by specific brain areas, such as the Fusiform Face Area, a part of the human visual system she named in 1997. Her lab is working to understand (among other things) how these functionally specific areas arise in development, and whether and how they change in adulthood. Kanwisher is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As a young researcher she had a side interest in journalism, even taking a summer off from her studies in the 1980s for a reporting trip in war-torn Nicaragua. Her dog Charlie has been cited as the best-known dog at MIT.