Peter NERI talk at ISC

On The February 25, 2020

11 am

Peter Neri (École Normale Supérieure, Paris and CNRS) will talk about "Human reconstruction of local image structure from natural scenes"

Retinal projections often poorly represent the structure of the physical world: well-defined boundaries within the eye may correspond to irrelevant features of the physical world, while critical features of the physical world may be nearly invisible at the retinal projection. Visual cortex is equipped with a specialized mechanism for sorting these two types of features according to their utility in interpreting the scene. I will present empirical measurements demonstrating that this process is quickly dominated by the inferred structure of the environment, and only minimally controlled by variations of raw image content. I will then use those measurements to constrain plausible computational accounts of local image reconstruction. Overall, these results challenge compartmentalized notions of bottom-up/top-down object segmentation, and suggest instead that these two modes are best viewed as an integrated perceptual mechanism.

Peter Neri
Salle du Conseil at ISC