How Biological Vision Succeeds In A World It Cannot See

Dale Purves is George Barth Geller Professor of Neurobiology at Duke University. He is also a professor at Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and professor at Department of Philosophy.Dr. Purves is a professor and Director, Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders Program at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, Singapore.Current research in the Purves laboratory concerns visual and auditory perception and the neurobiological underpinnings of perceptual phenomena. Ongoing investigations in vision include understanding the perception of lightness, brightness, color, orientation, motion, and depth; the interest in audition concerns understanding pitch relationships in music, based on the similarity of musical tones and voiced speech. The unifying theme of these projects is the hypothesis that perceptions are generated according to a wholly empirical strategy that presents in consciousness (or in unconscious behavior) the empirical rank of stimuli rather than stimulus features, or the properties of objects in the world. This theory of perception and its relation to brain structure and function is being explored by examining the responses of human subjects, the statistical relation of stimuli and their sources in natural image and sound databases, and the properties of artificial neural networks evolved in simulated environments.