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Abstract

Humans are primarily visual beings, and my talk is about visual perception and
processing in the human brain. I will first review some of the classic evidence of
functional specialization – the counterintuitive organization principle that fea
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tures such as color and motion are processed in separate pathways. Next I will
present consequences of this – psychophysical evidence (a demonstration plus
data) for the slowness of visual feature binding, and the latest fMRI evidence
for specialized loci within V1 representing bound features.
In the second half of the talk will deviate from well-controlled studies, and
describe imaging approaches to study brain function in natural conditions,
when subjects view movies. I will demonstrate that not only specialized regions,
such as FFA, V4 and V5/MT can be mapped, but also retinotopy and tonotopy,
using entirely uncontrolled data.
Finally, I will use the same movie data to present evidence for segregated
processing of ego-motion and object-motion in the parietal cortex.