Talk by Prof. Michael Herzog (EPFL, Lausanne): "From the Fundamentals of Vision to Consciousness", 03.05.2023, 14:15 - 15:15 Uhr

From the Fundamentals of Vision to Consciousness

Prof. Michael Herzog (Laboratory of Psychophysics, EPFL, Lausanne)

The relationship between the objects of the external world and our percepts is a never-ending topic in philosophy. Psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are very little impressed by this debate. In these fields, vision is usually explained by (feedforward) models, where visual features are analyzed in a hierarchical fashion starting with simple, but fine-grained, feature analysis (V1). Higher visual areas pool information from lower ones to detect increasingly complex features, eventually, leading to the perception of an object. Deep networks show the power of this approach. Nevertheless, with psychophysical (crowding, backward masking) and neuroimaging studies (EEG, fMRI), I will show that this model does not capture human vision and that the fundamentals of conscious perception consist of long-lasting periods of unconscious processing followed by a short discrete, conscious percept. Finally, going back to the philosophical questions, I will show how these results undermine our intuitions about how we perceive objects of the external world.