Chemical Engineering Seminar Series: Prof. S P Arun

How does the brain solve generic visual tasks?

What do we use our vision for? Most visual tasks involve searching for specific visual features, like the face of a friend or your cycle keys. But there are a variety of visual tasks where we are looking for a particular property in the image. For instance, have I seen this person before? Are these two fruits identical? Are these two products identical? We make countless such choices each day, suggesting that the concept of same or different is a fundamental building block of cognition. This task would be trivial if there were no differences between items we need to call as same, and large differences between items that we need to call different. But this task is non-trivial because even the same object can look very different under different conditions, and related objects often share similarities and yet have differences.