SP Arun received his Bachelors degree from IIT Bombay, and MS & PhD from Johns Hopkins University, all in Electrical Engineering. He completed his postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University and joined as a faculty at the Centre for Neuroscience. All along the way, he read too much science fiction for his own good, got curious about why robots still cannot solve the most basic tasks that our brains solve so effortlessly, and began studying sensation and perception in the brain. His lab, the Vision Lab@IISc, studies how the brain solves vision by investigating behavior and brain imaging in humans as well as behavior and neural activity in monkeys and by comparing vision in brains and machine algorithms. 

Talk Title: 

How does our brain solve generic visual tasks? 

Abstract: 

  Most visual tasks involve searching for specific visual features, like the face of a friend or your cycle keys. But we also often perform generic tasks where we look for specific property, such as finding an odd item, deciding if two items are same, or if an object has symmetry. These tasks have no defining visual feature to look for but rather a property in the image that we seem to effortlessly find. How does our brain solve such tasks?   

      Using simple neural rules, we show that displays with repeating elements can be distinguished from heterogeneous displays using a property we define as visual homogeneity. In behavior, visual homogeneity predicted response times on visual search and symmetry tasks. Brain imaging during these tasks revealed that visual homogeneity in both tasks is localized to a region in the object-selective cortex. I will also present some preliminary work in which we are exploiting the neural basis of these tasks as well as the neural basis of natural behaviours using wireless neural recordings from freely moving monkeys. For more details, please visit the homepage of our research group, the Vision Lab @ IISc.

https://sites.google.com/site/visionlabiisc/