How the Brain Represents Objects

Objects constitute the fundamental currency of the brain: they are things that we perceive, remember, and think about. One of the most important objects for a primate is a face. Research on the macaque face patch system in recent years has given us a remarkable window into the detailed processes underlying object recognition. Dr. Tsao will discuss recent findings from her lab elucidating the code for face and object identity in the temporal lobe, and how this code is used by downstream areas. Finally, she will discuss the general problem of how the brain builds a model of the world, and how we are leveraging our access to a hierarchical network for encoding object identity to gain new insight into this problem.