Departmental Colloquium: Ed Vul, UC San Diego, Structured inference and representations in visual cognition

Structured inference and representations in visual cognition

Human cognition can get so much from just a little input by bootstrapping rich expectations about how the world works.  Here I will talk about two strands of research that characterize the knowledge and expectations that people bring to bear on problems in visual cognition in a highly structured world.  I will describe how visual memory exploits the structure of the world to encode complex scenes, and how perception uses an understanding of physics to extrapolate world dynamics to make predictions and make decisions.