[BIC-announce] FW: TODAY'S Killam speaker - Neural mechanisms of object recognition in cortex: About pipelines, phonemes and flying crossbodies

[Jennifer Chew, Ms.]

PLEASE DISCARD IF THIS IS A DUPLICATE.  Jennifer

From: MNISTAFF - Montreal Neurological Institute Staff [mailto:MNISTAFF at LISTS.MCGILL.CA] On Behalf Of Enza Ferracane, Ms.
Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2013 11:58 AM
To: MNISTAFF at LISTS.MCGILL.CA
Subject: TODAY'S Killam speaker

**KILLAM   LECTURE**

Speaker:  Max Riesenhuber   http://riesenhuberlab.neuro.georgetown.edu/index

Title:   "Neural mechanisms of object recognition in cortex: About pipelines, phonemes, and flying crossbodies"

Date:    TODAY

Time:    4 pm

Place:  de Grandpre Communications Center at the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI)
             directions  http://neuromedia.mcgill.ca/mnibooking/facdirections/dgccdir.htm

Abstract:
Object recognition is a fundamental cognitive task that the brain performs countless times every day - such as right now when reading the words in this abstract. Yet, despite the apparent ease with which we see, object recognition is a very difficult computational problem. It is even more difficult from a biological perspective, since it involves several levels of understanding, from the level of cellular and biophysical mechanisms up to the level of brain systems and behavior. Remarkably, recent results covering areas as varied as face perception, reading, car categorization and auditory phoneme processing suggest an appealingly simple unified account of how our brains assign meaning to sensory stimuli, based on a "simple-to-complex" processing hierarchy that builds invariant feature representations which in turn form efficient representations for downstream modules tuned to different recognition tasks. I will review some of the experimental and computational evidence for this account. Then I will present new results demonstrating the computational power of the model for biologically-inspired machine vision, and show how this framework can serve to drive experiments probing categorization also in other sensory domains, providing evidence that the dorsal auditory stream performs automatic phoneme categorization and may be recruited to support speech decision tasks. Finally, I will present results that show that while the brain can recognize stimuli based on a single fast "feedforward" pass through the processing hierarchy, this feedforward pass is followed by re-entrant, feedback activity that limits throughput, causing the well-known "Attentional Blink" bottleneck.

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