TALK: Talk: James T. Enns (UBC) - The Predictive Brain

In the late 1990’s my colleagues and I began to ask whether the emerging view in neuroscience — that the brain was massively reentrant — had any consequences for visual perception and psychophysics. We came to the conclusion that it fundamentally changed the way we understood visual masking (making a perfectly visible object vanish from consciousness by following it with another object). When we looked beyond to our understanding of visual priming, visual search, and visual motion, we found that this new perspective had profound influences there as well. Most recently, in my lab, we have taken this perspective to better understand visual speech perception, interactions between the senses (touch–vision) and how implicit predictions and postdictions combine in motion perception to help us see objects in motion.