Event overview
Professor Diane Beck, University of Illinois, will give the Psychology Department Seminar on Real-world Statistical Regularities and Visual Perception
Diane Beck is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois. Her research program is aimed at identifying the cognitive processes and neural structures that enable and limit our visual representations of the world.
It has been known for some time that prior knowledge shapes our perception and there is a long tradition in psychology of framing perception as a process of generating and then verifying a perceptual hypothesis. Professor Beck will propose that the perceptual hypothesis, or prediction, takes the form of learned statistical regularities.
In particular, she will describe evidence that real-world statistical regularities, i.e. regularities built up over lifetime, affect perception, and not just our ability to recognize images but to detect their presence. She will also show that, consistent with predictive coding models, statistically irregular images evoke more visual activity than statistically regular ones and that while this difference is context dependent, it does not require full attention. Together the results support models of perception in which the visual system generates and then verifies a prediction.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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19 Oct 2023 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm |
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