Reverse engineering primate visual object perception

How do you recognize the items on your desk? The faces of your loved ones? The words on this page? Our research goal is to understand the neuronal algorithms and circuits that underlie visual object recognition -- an understanding that might help change the world. Concretely, we seek to understand how the visual system transforms each image from an initial, pixel-like representation, to a new, remarkably powerful form of representation -- one that can support our seemingly effortless ability to solve these object recognition tasks in the real world. We are focussed on the crux "invariance" problem -- the ability to distinguish among objects despite dramatic image variation; [1], [2]. To approach this very difficult problem, the work of our research group is directed along three main lines