[CCoE Notice] CNECS Talk: M.H. Herzog, EPFL

[Ogmen, Haluk]

Center for NeuroEngineering and Cognitive Science
SEMINAR
How the Conscious Mind Constitutes itself through Perceptual Learning

Michael H. Herzog
Brain Mind Institute
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Perceptual learning is learning to see. Whereas novices can hardly discriminate a Bourgogne from a Bordeaux wine, wine experts, sommeliers, cannot only easily discriminate between the two but can often even identify the grape and vineyard of a wine. Lifelong training makes experts. In the laboratory, training improves the perception of all basic visual features including: motion direction, orientation, vernier and bisection offsets. Perceptual learning is thought to be driven by the repeated presentation of stimuli. Stimuli drive synaptic changes. These changes are usually well modeled by unsupervised and unsupervised neural networks. Experimentally, there is good evidence for such stimulus-driven learning. However, we have recently shown that stimulus presentation is neither sufficient nor necessary for perceptual learning. Perceptual learning can occur by mental imagery alone. We presented a blank screen and asked observers to imagine a Gabor stimulus. This imagery training improved performance as determined in pre- and post-training baseline measurements. Existing models cannot explain these results. Using combinatorial reasoning, we discuss why imagery learning is not as exotic as it might seem.

Date: Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Time: 1PM-2PM
Location: N355-D (Engineering Building 1)
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