“What you think you don’t see determines what you think you do see”
Date: Wednesday, November 18
Time: 12:40 p.m.
Place: A-130, FEASS Building
Assistant. Prof. Dr. Jennifer Corbett
Department of Psychology
We “see” the world as stable and complete, which is remarkable because we often miss changes right in front of us and the retinal image changes continuously. So how does the visual system impose this “illusion” of order on chaos? Understanding the relationships between internal cognitive states and the external world is a fundamental challenge in almost all branches of science. Cognitive neuroscience has revolutionized our understanding of how the visual brain encodes objects. Yet, we still know little about how it uses the vast amount of visual input that cannot be explicitly encoded. In pursuit of this over-arching question, I will present a number of recent findings that converge to suggest the visual system relies on a default set of heuristic regularities in the external environment to constrain processing in an “intelligent” fashion -with emphasis on experiments currently being conducted in my lab to investigate how such regularities shape the manner in which we see, remember, and pay attention to information. These new approaches to a classic problem in vision research promise insight for our understanding of how the limited-capacity visual system relies on the canonical structure and redundancy in the surrounding environment to “fill-in the big picture,”mediating between the needs to perceive stability and detect salient information.