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The Shape of Our Thoughts (Visual Perception of Geometric Shape)

Lecture | January 19 | 11 a.m.-12 p.m. | 100 Genetics & Plant Biology Building

Speaker: Mark Lescroart, UC Berkeley

Sponsor: Science@Cal

Most people think that "seeing" is something that happens in the eyes, but many aspects of our perception of the world are determined by neural computations that occur in the brain. The visual cortex - the part of the brain that processes vision - takes up nearly a third of our cerebral real estate. Different regions of the visual cortex respond to different aspects or features of visual stimuli. I will (briefly) go over a few examples of deficits that can occur when parts of the visual cortex are damaged, and I will discuss my own work, which shows how intermediate visual processing areas in the visual cortex respond to variation in object silhouettes and 3D surface orientations.

Mark Lescroart is a postdoctoral researcher in the Gallant laboratory at UC Berkeley. He got his PhD in 2011, working with Irving Biederman at the University of Southern California. Mark also went to USC for undergrad, and graduated summa cum laude in 2002 with a B.S. in Psychobiology and a minor in Japanese. Mark studies the way our brains transform patterns of light on our retinas into useful information about the shape and structure of objects in the world. He has also written popular science articles for Scientific American Mind.

This free public talk is presented as part of the monthly "Science@Cal Lecture Series".

Target audience: General Public

Open to audience: All Audiences

Event Contact: scroft@astro.berkeley.edu

Webcast: Webcast. Events are recorded and typically made available a few days after the event.