Topic: Bottom-up

Decades of research on understanding the mechanisms of attentional selection have focused on identifying the units (representations) on which attention operates in order to guide prioritized sensory processing. These attentional units fit neatly to accommodate our understanding of how attention is allocated in a top-down, bottom-up, or historical fashion. In this talk, I will focus on attentional phenomena that are not easily accommodated within current theories of attentional selection – the “attentional platypuses,” as they allude to an observation that within biological taxonomies the platy

Retinal projections often poorly represent the structure of the physical world: well-defined boundaries within the eye may correspond to irrelevant features of the physical world, while critical features of the physical world may be nearly invisible at the retinal projection. Visual cortex is equipped with specialized mechanisms for sorting these two types of features according to their utility in interpreting the scene, however we know little or nothing about their perceptual computations. I will present novel paradigms for the characterization of these processes in human vision, alongside ex