University of Cambridge > Talks.cam > Craik Club > Dynamics of visual perception and collective neural activity

Dynamics of visual perception and collective neural activity

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

If you have a question about this talk, please contact John Mollon.

The host for this talk is Professor Zoƫ Kourtzi

Visual perception has all the hallmarks of an ongoing, cooperative-competitive process: probabilistic outcome, self-organization, order-disorder transitions, multi-stability, and hysteresis. Accordingly, it is tempting to speculate that the underlying collective neural activity performs an exploratory attractor dynamics (spontaneous transitions between distinct steady-states), perhaps at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Here I summarize our recent investigations of this dynamical hypothesis. In several instances, a careful empirical study of perceptual dynamics fully constrains an idealized model of the stochastic dynamics of collective neural activity.

I conclude that the dynamical hypothesis outlined above permits a particularly close and direct back-and-forth between perceptual experiment and computational theory and thus has the potential to dramatically accelerate our progress in understanding visual function.

This talk is part of the Craik Club series.

Tell a friend about this talk:

This talk is included in these lists:

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.

 

© 2006-2024 Talks.cam, University of Cambridge. Contact Us | Help and Documentation | Privacy and Publicity