Topic is perceptual organization in vision

The latest advances in understanding how the brain organizes and interprets information that the eye sees will be explored by scientists attending the annual Carnegie Symposium on Cognition June 2-4 at Carnegie Mellon University.

Titled "Perceptual Organization in Vision: Behavioral and Neural Perspectives," the symposium is sponsored by the university's Department of Psychology and its Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Speakers at the symposium will bring together a diverse set of research perspectives that bear on the problem of understanding perceptual organization in vision. This is the first conference to be held on the topic since 1977.

"How we organize visual information is not a passive process," said Carnegie Mellon Psychology Professor Marlene Behrmann, one of the conference chairpersons. "Our brains actively work with the information obtained from the visual world to make it coherent. Scientists working in many fields have been making independent, significant advances toward understanding how the brain translates and understands what it sees. This is a good time to bring together the converging perspectives."

Carnegie Mellon scientists and other internationally known experts in the field of cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, neuropsychology, neurophysiology and computer modeling will address issues raised by a growing body of research dealing with normal development and understanding of the visual world and research that explores what is happening when the brain fails to recognize what it sees. Carl Olson, a senior research scientist at Carnegie Mellon's Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, and Ruth Kimchi, senior lecturer in the Psychology Department of the University of Haifa in Israel, also are chairing the symposium.

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Contact: Teresa Thomas
ts2h@andrew.cmu.edu
412-268-3580
Carnegie Mellon University
18-May-2000