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Member-Initiated Symposia
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Member-Initiated SymposiaMember-initiated symposia will take place at the start of this year's 2010. Three symposia will be held at two time slots. Friday, May 7, Time TBDDissociations between top-down attention and visual awarenessOrganizers: Jeroen van Boxtel, California Institute of Technology and Nao Tsuchiya, California Institute of Technology, USA and Tamagawa University, Japan We intuitively think that we become aware of the objects to which we pay attention. Does this mean that attention and awareness are identical? In our symposium, we argue that attention and awareness are separate processes, and highlight recent methodological breakthroughs that allow for the experimental separation of the two. We describe counterintuitive instances when attention and awareness act in opposition, such as when increases in attention result in poor performance. Finding clear distinctions between attention and awareness is important for our scientific understanding of how awareness arises from physical neuronal processes in the brain. Representation in the Visual System by Summary StatisticsOrganizers: Ruth Rosenholtz, MIT Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences Why is visual search sometimes difficult, even with easily discriminable target and distractors? How can we effortlessly judge scene gist, yet seem unaware of many details? Why does peripheral vision appear crisp and detailed, yet the percept is often jumbled and recognition prey to crowding? What information is available to guide understanding of a complex display? A recent convergence of evidence suggests a key insight: that peripheral and unattended vision have access only to local summary statistics. This symposium will discuss evidence for this representation, links with ventral stream physiology, and implications for a range of visual tasks. Nature vs. Nurture in Vision: Evidence from Typical and Atypical DevelopmentOrganizers: Faraz Farzin, University of California, Davis Understanding the roles of genetics and the environment on the development of visual processing abilities is a longstanding yet rapidly advancing area of vision research. This symposium aims to bring together developmental researchers to review the latest findings on the topic of nature and nurture in typically and atypically developing visual systems. Speakers will present data from populations including preterm infants, twins, children with amblyopia and developmental disorders, collected using methodologies such as psychophysics, eye tracking, and electrophysiology. Discussion and debate will center around our current understanding of functional and anatomical organization of the developing visual system as a result of genetically predetermined and environmentally-driven factors. Understanding the interplay between reward and attention, and its effects on visual perception and actionOrganizers: Vidhya Navalpakkam, Caltech; Leonardo Chelazzi, University of Verona, Medical School, Italy and Jan Theeuwes, Vrije Universiteit, the Netherlands Attending to behaviorally relevant objects and ignoring irrelevant objects in the environment is important for efficient functioning of organisms. How does this selection occur? This symposium will focus on how reward affects selective attention, and visual perception. It will provide a unique forum for researchers to discuss the interplay between reward and attention, and their effects on visual perception and action, from a behavioral, neuroscience and computational perspective. Integrative mechanisms for 3D vision: combining psychophysics, computation and neuroscienceOrganizers: Andrew Glennerster, University of Reading Our ability to perceive 3D structure based on 2D retinal signals has been marveled at for centuries and provides considerable appeal for modern cinemagoers. Understanding the basis of this ability is a rich and complex problem that requires an integrated, multipronged approach. This symposium brings together different perspectives (psychophysics, computation, imaging and physiology) to review progress in understanding the mechanism that support humans in perceiving 3D structure. It will highlight efforts to understand the nature of the visual signals, their mapping to depth interpretations and the neural architectures that underlie the use of the signals for different functional purposes. New Methods for Delineating the Brain and Cognitive Mechanisms of AttentionOrganizers: George Sperling, University of California, Irvine Six of the world's leading vision scientists review an enormous range of
methods, phenomena, and theories of visual attention, and
the remarkable insights achieved by combining carefully
controlled experiments with computational modeling. DeYoe uses fMRI
to derive attention maps in visual cortex; Gallant uses natural images
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