Topic: visual cognition

Vision and visual cognition is experience-dependent with likely multiple sensitive periods, but we know very little about statistics of visual experience at the scale of everyday life and how they might change with development. By traditional assumptions, the world at the massive scale of daily life presents pretty much the same visual statistics to all perceivers. I will present an overview our work on ego-centric vision showing that this is not the case. The momentary image received at the eye is spatially selective, dependent on the location, posture and behavior of the perceiver. If a p

Praying mantises are the only insects known to have stereo vision. We used a comparative approach to determine how the mechanisms underlying stereopsis in mantises differ from those underlying primate stereo vision. By testing mantises with virtual 3D targets we showed that mantis stereopsis enables prey capture in complex scenes but the mechanisms underlying it differ from those underlying primate stereopsis. My talk will further discuss how stereopsis combines with second-order motion perception to enable the detection of camouflaged prey by mantises. The talk will highlight the benefits of