Scholtelab

When we open our eyes we experience a rich visual perception of different colors, objects, and textures embedded in complex, dynamic scenes. In anticipation and processing this array of visual information, we rapidly identify different objects, faces, and even emotional expressions. In short, we extract meaningful representations from the statistical structure of the world.

How does the brain transform visual information into meaningful representations? What cognitive and neural architecture underlies this process? And how does this architecture develop? In trying to answer these types of questions we study vision using behavioral paradigms, human neuroimaging, lesion analysis, and computational modelling. We use visual perception to approach these questions because this is a well studied system at multiple levels, easily to manipulate at an experimental level and because a huge chunk of brain hardware is dedicated to this function. Ultimately, we adopt a multidisciplinary experimental and modelling approach that aims to further understanding of the one of the most astounding features of the human brain: how it processes and understands the world through vision.