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 (Zoom link) unless otherwise specified. In-person talks are held in Room 819. As scheduling is ongoing, some of the "free" slots may be filled.
Fall 2025
- Ione Fine (UW—Seattle/U. of Leeds) — I can hear what you see: auditory cortical plasticity in congenitally blind individuals
September 2nd, 2025 (online)
Almost one-quarter of the brain is normally devoted to processing visual information: reading text, recognizing faces, following the Sunday football match, and much more. The brain's visual cortex contains specialized regions devoted to processing motion, text, faces etc. In congenitally blind individuals, much of the 'visual' cortex responds strongly to auditory and tactile input rather than to visual stimuli, a phenomenon known as cross-modal plasticity. Here I will discuss what our laboratory has discovered about the representation of sound in early blind individuals, and what this reveals about the plasticity of the human brain.
- James Pomerantz (Rice) — Perception, attention, and Gestalts: Fundamental facts and persisting puzzles
September 9th, 2025 (online)
Some of the essential findings about human perception are given short shrift these days, bumped out by more recent, even trendy findings that may pass the test of time. My talk will present a blend of old and new, covering the most fundamental principles of perception and attention, often illustrated by means of illusions, and moving on to selected remaining mysteries. I will show how methods developed to study attention, some originating at Illinois under Charles Eriksen, have helped create powerful, objective measures of perceptual organization and the formation of Gestalts.
- No meeting on September 16th, 2025
- Aditya Upadhyalula (Wash U. St. Louis) — Anchors in Time: How Prediction and Key Moments Shape Perception, Comprehension & Memory
of Continuous Experiences
September 23rd, 2025 (in-person)
Every day experience feels seamless, yet the mind and brain must overcome bottlenecks in perception and attention to construct this continuity. How does the brain bridge these gaps? One possibility is that it relies on knowledge about unfolding experiences to fill them in. To test this, we used a temporal change blindness paradigm in which participants watched naturalistic movies containing occasional jumps during saccades. Forward jumps were less frequently detected than backward jumps, suggesting that predictive knowledge about how events unfold shapes perceptual continuity. Follow-up experiments confirmed that this effect was not tied to oculomotor responses per se, but reflected broader principles of predictive processing.
How are such experiences represented in the brain? One hypothesis is that continuous experiences are mentally compressed into a subset of key moments that anchor comprehension and memory. Using a storyboard paradigm, we found that participants consistently converged on the same key moments as most important for conveying the underlying story. fMRI analyses showed that these moments corresponded to peaks of neural synchrony across participants in the default mode network, and that their neural signatures were preferentially reinstated during recall. Complementary analyses using natural language processing revealed that these moments disproportionately carried the semantic content of the narratives.
Together, these findings suggest that experiences feel seamless because top-down knowledge fills in perceptual gaps, and that continuous experiences are structured and remembered through a subset of key moments that serve as anchors for comprehension and memory.
- No meeting on September 30th, 2025 — attend department colloquium instead on Oct 3rd if possible
- Harini Sankar (Illinois), October 7th, 2025 — in-person
- Siddharth Munupatrula (Illinois), October 14th, 2025 — in-person
- Ling Lee Chong (Illinois), October 21st, 2025 — in-person
- Cyrus Yu (Illinois), October 28th, 2025 — in-person
- Zach Hambrick (MSU), November 4th, 2025
- Jerry Hu (Brown), November 11th, 2025
- Howard Tan (Illinois), November 18th, 2025 — in-person
- Fall break — No meeting on November 25th, 2025
- Yifan Ding (Illinois), December 2nd, 2025 — in-person
- (Probably) no meeting on December 9th, 2025