Special Topics in Cognitive Neuroscience: Visual Cognition

In this seminar, we will explore the interaction of vision with higher-order cognitive processes. In particular, we will address the question: once the visual system has recovered a set of surfaces from the surrounding scene, what does it do with this information to make it useful? Possible topics include: general organization of the visual system, object and face recognition, scene perception, spatial cognition and navigation, and visual consciousness. Results obtained using several different cognitive neuroscience methods will be discussed, including behavioral experiments, neuroimaging experiments (fMRI), neuropsychological experiments (on brain-damaged patients), and neurophysiological experiments (recordings from single neurons in animals).