News Release

Carnegie Mellon's Carnegie Symposium on Cognition

Meeting Announcement

Carnegie Mellon University

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.

Each day of the conference will focus on a particular theme and will consist of a series of lectures followed by discussion.

Speakers on June 2 will focus on research surrounding normal development of cognitive approaches to visual perception, object memory, grouping in space and time and visual object formation. June 3 will be devoted to presenting studies relating to infants' understanding of the visual world and studies done in primate labs. The third day (June 4) of the conference will be devoted to discussing what happens when a person can perceive the basic elements of a familiar object but cannot recognize them.

University of California at Berkeley Psychology Professor Stephen Palmer, an internationally known researcher in perceptual representation and processes and author of "Vision Science: from Photons to Phenomenology," will be the first featured speaker on June 2 and his remarks are expected to provide a framework for the discussions that follow.

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Specifics about the conference can be found at: http://www.psy.cmu.edu/perceptualorganization/.

The Carnegie Symposium Series is sponsored annually by the Department of Psychology. Past conferences have addressed the topics of consciousness, children and learning, problem solving and implicit memory. As in other years, all of the talks presented at this year's symposium will be incorporated into a book, which should be available in the year 2001.

The conference will be held in the Adamson Wing, Room 135, Baker Hall, on Carnegie Mellon's campus. For specific information about registration, please call Rochelle Sherman at 412-268-3151 in the Psychology Department.


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