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From: Sam Solomon <samuels@physiol.usyd.edu.au> Date: 13 November 2012 22:09 To: Matteo Carandini <matteo@carandinilab.net>, Alan Johnston <a.johnston@ucl.ac.uk>, "Joshua A. Solomon" <J.A.Solomon@city.ac.uk>, "Steven Dakin" <s.dakin@ucl.ac.uk>, Simon Schultz <s.schultz@imperial.ac.uk>, m.hausser@ucl.ac.uk Subject: [Cognition, Perceptual and Brain Sciences Seminar] Davide Zoccolan, 4pm, 27th Nov 2012 Dear all, I'm not exactly sure of how to write to the various vision-interest and lab lists that are run, but could we try to advertise the following talk. Davide does very interesting stuff. Best wishes Sam

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Cognition, Perceptual and Brain Sciences Seminar Series

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Speaker: Davide Zoccolan, SISSA, Trieste Title: A rodent model for the study of invariant visual object

recognition

Time: 4pm, Tuesday 27th November, 2012 Place: Room 305, 26 Bedford Way, London

Abstract: The ability to recognize objects despite tremendous variation in their appearance (e.g., because of position or size changes) represents such a formidable computational feat that it is widely assumed to be unique to primates. Such an assumption has restricted the investigation of its neuronal underpinnings to primate studies, which allow only a limited range of experimental approaches. In recent years, the increasingly powerful array of optical and molecular tools that has become available in rodents has spurred a renewed interest for rodent models of visual functions. However, evidence of primate-like visual object processing in rodents is still very limited and controversial.

In this seminar, I will present behavioral evidence showing that rats are capable of recognizing visual objects in spite of substantial variation in their appearance, i.e., in spite of changes in size, position, illumination, in-depth rotation and in-plane rotation. I will also show that such a transformation-tolerant (or invariant) recognition is largely accounted by rat ability to spontaneously perceive different views/appearances of an object as similar (i.e., as instances of the same object). Finally, I will show that rat object recognition relies on a shape-based, multi-featural processing strategy that makes close-to-optimal use of the discriminatory information afforded by the target objects across their various appearances.

Overall, these findings indicate that rats are able to process and efficiently use shape information, in a way that is largely tolerant to variation in object appearance, thus supporting spontaneous generalization of recognition to previously unseen views of learned objects. This suggests that their visual system may serve as a powerful model to study the neuronal substrates of invariant visual object recognition.