Event Details:
MBC IGERT Graduate Training Seminar Talk and Dinner
The presentation by Professor Irving Biederman, USC, is entitled “The Neural Basis of Shape Recognition”. Whereas people can readily describe the differences between two highly similar objects (such as birds on the same page in a bird guide), they are at a loss in describing the difference between the faces of Tom Cruise and John Travolta. A remarkably simple account, based on early cortical spatial filtering, may be able to explain the ineffability of faces and a wide variety of other phenomena distinguishing face from object recognition, such as why the recognition of faces, but not objects, is so severely disrupted by contrast negation (as when viewing a photographic negative) and orientation inversion, and why faces, but not objects, are represented “configurally” (and what could “configural” possibly mean in neurocomputational terms?). If you plan on attending the MBC IGERT Graduate Training dinner on Monday, January 12, please remember to RSVP by Jan. 6 to lehope@stanford.edu The seminar will be held in Sloan Hall, Math Bldg 380, Room 380-C, lower level courtyard side, at 5:15pm followed by dinner in the courtyard outside of Jordan Hall, Bldg 420, Room 050.