Brian Scholl (Yale University), “Visual Intelligence: On the Unexpected Sophistication of Perception “

It is natural to think of vision as relatively primitive, compared to the richness of higher-level cognition. But recent work has revealed how perception is unexpectedly sophisticated along several related dimensions.  First, recent work suggests that visual processing spontaneously extracts not only simple features such as color, shape, and motion, but also properties more associated with higher-level thought — such as agency, causal history, and intuitive physics.  (Appreciating that a tower is about to fall, for example — or that an object looks the way it does because it was crushed, or that another agent is attending to us — seems more like perceiving a shape than proving a theorem.)  Second, vision turns out to be selective in various sophisticated ways, automatically discounting some information while highlighting properties of special import — such as information that categorically distinguishes different dynamic “event types” (e.g. bouncing, rolling, scooping, and pouring).  Third, the acuity of perception is specially tuned to provide high-resolution representations about high-importance information — such as the degree of pupil dilation in other people.  Here I’ll review recent work from our lab supporting each of these three related dimensions of “visual intelligence”.  This presentation will involve some results and some statistics, but the key claims will also be illustrated with phenomenologically vivid demonstrations in which you’ll be able to directly experience the effects.  Collectively, this work presents a new way to think about how perception delivers a rich interpretation of the world to the mind at large.

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI and on Zoom.

Photo by v2osk on Unsplash.