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Regular version of the site

Invited lectures by prof. Patrick Cavanagh

Patrick Cavanagh presented three lectures in HSE, Moscow. The first one was intended for a wide audience, and the other two were for professionals in the field of perception and attention.


The first lecture “The Artist as Neuroscientist” talked about artists, how they create artworks and how they violate grouping rules without noticeable influence final perception of picture. With this he tries to reveal fundamental patterns of visual perception, which might be important for cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists.

In the second lecture "Predictive spatial coding" professor Cavanagh illustrated the constructive nature of human cognition with empirical data material from his recent experiments.

He showed the principle of «predictive» coding in the visual perception that was studied on visual illusion “flash capture” and “flash shift“. It was found that people evaluate item position based on previous evaluations, despite of the focus shift.

In the final (third) lecture "The language of vision" Patrick Cavanagh discussed a new metaphor of visual perception as a language with its own syntax and semantics. He support this ideas with recent results from studies of different fields of visual perception psychology.