Title: Constructing the Present

Speaker:

Prof. Patrick Cavanagh

Department of Psychology, Glendon College

Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College

Time: 10:00-11:30, April 10, 2019

Location: Liberary Report Hall, Institute of Biophysics, CAS

Abstract:

How do we know where things are? Recent results indicate that an object’s visual location is constructed at a high level where, critically, an object’s motion is discounted to recover its current location. As a result, we sometimes see a target far from its actual location. One particular target, the double-drift stimulus, develops very large illusory shifts based on an integration time of well over a second, suggesting the involvement of processes with the time course of short-term memory. fMRI results show that the illusion does not emerge in the visual cortex but is seen in the frontal lobes, where visual-spatial short-term memory areas would have the temporal integration required to support the effect. In summary, these findings suggest that perception is a function of the frontal lobes, although where or how remains to be understood.

Short Bio

Professor Patrick Cavanagh is a leader in research in visual neuroscience and perception, specifically in motion perception, spatial vision, color vision, attentional processes, object recognition and the links between art and brain function. His work on attention has opened up new directions in this active field.

Host: Prof. Sheng He, Prof. Fang Fang