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Banbury Center Workshop Series

Neurocomputational Strategies: From Synapses to Behavior (1998)
Functional Organization of the Thalamus and Cortex and their Interactions (1999)
Toward Animal Models of Attention and Consciousness (2000)
Persistent Neural Activity (2000)
Can a Machine Be Conscious? (2001)
Communication in Brain Systems (2004)
Neurobiology of Decision-Making (2005)
Computational Approaches to Cortical Functions (2006)
New Frontiers in Studies of Nonconscious Processing (2007)
Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Auditory and Visual Attention (2008)
Searching for Principles Underlying Memory in Biological Systems (2009)
Neuronal Response Variability and Cortical Computation (2011)
Connections and Communication in the Brain (2014)

Ted Adelson (invited speaker)

Perceptual Organization in Motion and Lightness Perception

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

It is hard to make progress in any area of vision without studying perceptual organization. For example, there are very simple motion stimuli that foil almost every model of motion analysis, because these models lack the sophisticated machinery needed to combined motion and form information across space. I will illustrate some of problems, and and suggest some solutions, based on our recent research with ambiguous motion stimuli. I will also discuss problems in lightness perception. Here again, perceptual organization turns out to be a critical part of computations, as evidenced by numerous illusions and other phenomena that depend on configural properties of a stimulus. I will also argue that the standard notions of grouping and binding are too simplistic to be very useful in visual computations. Psychophysical and computational considerations suggest that there may be multiple grouping mechanisms operating in parallel, each with rules appropriate to its task.