Inference and introspection in the primate visual system

Speaker: Robbe Goris, Ph.D.

Abstract:

To accomplish goals, humans and other animals must infer properties of the environment in the face of uncertainty and change. I will discuss psychophysical, physiological, and theoretical work from my lab that interrogates the computational principles and neural mechanisms that enable humans and macaque monkeys to do this. I will argue that our visual system represents the environment in a manner that facilitates temporal prediction, that perceptual inference can be directly recognized in neural population activity in the prefrontal cortex, and that our brain keeps track of the uncertainty of perceptual interpretations.  

Speaker Bio:

Robbe Goris is a computational neuroscientist who seeks to understand how neural circuits in the primate brain process visual information and support visually guided behavior. He is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and uses a combination of behavioral, electrophysiological, and computational techniques in his research. His work has clarified the structure of neural response variability in visual cortex, illuminated how anticipation shapes visual representations of the natural environment, and revealed how neural circuits in prefrontal cortex support perceptual interpretation and action planning.

Host: Wenhao Zhang, Ph.D.