Session 2C: Symposium – “Brain Function in Health and Disease”

Sumantra Chattarji - CHINTA, Kolkata

There is more to vision than meets the eye

We see and recognize objects effortlessly every day, but in fact vision is an extremely challenging computational problem. The best computer vision algorithms today still struggle at the simplest of vision tasks. Vision is not easy for the brain either: nearly 40% of the brain is taken up by visual processing of one kind or the other. Damage to visual processing regions in the brain causes complex disorders that are difficult to treat because we still do not understand normal visual processing. So how does the brain accomplish vision? What are the underlying mechanisms and algorithms? Our lab has been studying how the brain solves vision by investigating perception and brain activity in humans, behavior and neural activity in monkeys, and by comparing vision in brains and machine algorithms. I will present some of our recent work demonstrating some novel computations performed by the brain to solve property based visual tasks in humans, and also some exciting findings elucidating the neural basis of real-world vision in monkeys.