EVENT: Psychology Colloquium: Prof David Burr (U Florence)

Psychology Colloquium Monday 5th September 5-6pm in Bayliss MCS G.33, followed by post-talk drinks in the Psychology Courtyard (or in bad weather, the Psychology Common Room, 2nd floor of main psychology building.)

Title: A generalized visual sense of number

Abstract:

Humans and many other animals can estimate rapidly and reasonably accurately the number of items in a scene. Neurophysiological studies in human and non-human primates suggest the existence of a dedicated numbersense, served by specialized neural mechanism in parietal and prefrontal cortex. In this talk I will summarize some psychophysical evidence for the numbersense in humans. Over a wide range of conditions, humans discriminate number spontaneously and directly, completely unconfounded by related attributes such as texture-density. Like other sensory attributes, the numbersense is selectively adaptable. At very high densities, however,perception becomes crowded and texture-mechanisms come into operation. The sense of number is truly general, responsible for encoding the numerostity of both simultaneous and sequential sets of elements, in all modalities (including action). As the capacity to discriminate numerosity (but not density) correlates with mathematical ability in school-age children, understanding the mechanism of this numbersense has practical as well as theoretical implications.

Presenter: Prof David Burr (U Florence)

David Burr graduated in psychology with 1st class honours from the University of Western Australia in 1975, and received his PhD in physiology and psychology from Cambridge in 1979. After a series of research positions in Pisa and Perth, he was appointed Professor of Physiological Psychology at Rome University in 1991. He has held the chair of Physiological Psychology at Florence University since 1997. He also holds an adjunct chair at the School of Psychology, University of WA. For nearly forty years he has studied the function of human sensory systems, particularly vision, resulting in major contributions in the field of motion perception, eye-movements, perception of time, perception of number and multi-sensory perception. His work is funded by external sources, including the prestigious European Research Council ERC advanced grant. His work has been published in over 200 papers in international journals, including Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Current Biology and PNAS. He is a senior editor of the major journal of the field Journal of Vision, and on the editorial board of Current Biology, Perception and Timing & Time Perception Reviews.