The neural basis of visual object recognition in monkeys and humans

Lectures: 1 session / week, 3 hours / session

Understanding the brain's remarkable ability for visual object recognition is one of the greatest challenges of brain research. The goal of this course is to provide an overview of key issues of object representation and to survey data from primate physiology and human fMRI that bear on those issues. Topics include: the computational problems of object representation, the nature of object representations in the brain, the tolerance and selectivity of those representations, and the effects of attention and learning.

For the first two sessions we will review relevant background material. Each of the following weeks, we will discuss several key papers that bear on a central topic. Each student is expected to read these papers, to participate in discussion, and to present and lead discussion on several papers over the course of the term.

This course is aimed at graduate students and enrollment is limited. Depending on demand, advanced undergraduate students may be admitted, but they will be expected to perform at a graduate student level.

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