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Project

The Role of Abstraction in the Representation of Categories in the Visual System

The ability to categorize is fundamental to how we make sense of the visual world. When we see, we assign structure and meaning to what we see: individual objects and events are perceived as particular kinds of things in the world around us. In so doing, we apply categorical labels, or representations, to what we see. How does our brain structures these categorical representations? If we think of the brain as a complex computer, then this is the same as asking what “code” the brain uses to construct these representations. My research is focused on the extent to which our brain makes use of abstraction in the code: is it composed of stored representations of each individual kind of thing we see (no abstraction), or does it preserve more abstract summaries? For example, we can readily distinguish whether something we see is an animate creature. One way a representation for animacy could be structured is that it is built out of stored representations for many animate things we have encountered in the past. Alternatively, our visual system might store a representation of common features, or “prototype”, for animacy rather than information about individual items. It could also be that the visual system employs a mixture of these two strategies, so that the code varies in its levels of abstraction. In my research I am investigating how abstraction features in the neural code of the categorical representation that underlie our ability to perceive a coherent visual world.

Date:1 Feb 2017 →  31 Jan 2020
Keywords:Representation of Categories, Visual System
Disciplines:Animal experimental and comparative psychology, Applied psychology, Human experimental psychology