Attention & Perception Talk Series

Links to the speaker's website and and talk information will be added as the semester goes along. Talks are online unless otherwise specified.

Spring 2025

• Brady Roberts — Memorable by design: The intrinsic properties of effective symbols

  January 21st, 2025 (in-person)

  Recent work has begun to evaluate the memorability of everyday visual symbols as a new way to understand how abstract concepts are processed in memory. Symbols were previously found to be highly memorable, especially relative to words, but it remained unclear what was driving memorability. Here, we bridged this gap by exploring the visual and conceptual attributes driving the high memorability observed for symbols. Participants were tested on their memory for conventional symbols (e.g., !@#$%) before sorting them based on visual or conceptual features. Principal component analyses performed on the sorting data then revealed which of these features predict symbol memorability. An artificial image generator was then used to form novel symbols while accentuating or downplaying predictive features to create a set of memorable and forgettable symbols, respectively. Both recognition and cued-recall memory performance were substantially improved for symbols that were designed to be memorable. This work suggests that specific visual attributes drive image memorability and offers initial evidence that memorability can be engineered.

• Thomas Langlois — Efficient Computations and Representations for Perceptual Inference and Communication

  February 4th, 2025 (in-person)

  In order to keep pace with a complex and ever-changing visual environment, the visual system must combine moment-to-moment sensory evidence with prior expectations that reflect predictable regularities in the environment. Although priors (and other subjective probability distributions) are key to visual perception, they are notoriously difficult to estimate because perception is an inherently private (subjective) experience. In this talk, I will highlight work using large-scale serial reproduction experiments to obtain stable estimates of subjective probability distributions in visual memory. I will also discuss recent work elucidating how neural population activity in the PFC integrates prior expectations with sensory signals during visual perception in macaque monkeys. Time permitting, I will highlight my current work investigating the relation between perceptual representations and emergent communication using the Information Bottleneck (IB) Principle.

• Qi Lin, February 11th, 2025
• Harini Sankar, February 18th, 2025 (in-person)
• Michael Beyeler, March 4th, 2025
• Keith Doelling, March 11th, 2025
• Galit Yovel, March 25th, 2025
• Cathleen Moore, April 1st, 2025
• Clara Colombatto, April 8th, 2025
• Daniel Albohn, April 15th, 2025 (in-person)
• Lucy Cui, April 22nd, 2025
• Michael Cohen, April 29th, 2025
• Yiwen Wang, May 6th, 2025 (in-person)