Charles Connor Quotations

Humans do a rough categorization of objects very quickly. For instance, in just a tenth of a second, we can recognize whether something we see is an animal or not. Our results show that this immediate, rough impression probably depends on recognizing just one or more individual parts of what we see. Fine discriminations such as recognizing individual faces take longer to happen, and our study suggests that this delay depends upon emerging signals for combinations of shape fragments. In a sense, the brain has to construct an internal representation of an object from disparate pieces.

Our ability to see is one of the great evolutionary accomplishments of the human brain. We still don't know how the visual system accomplishes this marvel of information processing. Such experiments are beginning to reveal how large networks of neurons in the brain extract meaning from the eye image.

Vision doesn't happen in the eye. It happens at multiple processing stages in the brain. We study how objects are signaled or encoded by large populations of neurons at higher-level stages in the object-processing part of the brain.