BVI Seminar: Exogenous visual attention and the primary visual cortex

Zhaoping Li, University College London

I will present a theory that primary visual cortex creates a saliency map to guide attention exogenously, and show how this explains and predicts experimental data in physiology and in visual behavior. Implications of this theory will be discussed.

Biography: I obtained my B.S. in Physics in 1984 from Fudan University, Shanghai, and Ph.D. in Physics in 1989 from California Institute of Technology. I was a postdoctoral researcher in Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois USA, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton New Jersey, USA, and Rockefeller University in New York USA. I have been a faculty member in Computer Science in Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and was a visiting scientist at various academic institutions. In 1998, I helped to found the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit in University College London. Currently, I am a Professor of computational neuroscience in the Department of Computer Science in University College London. My research experience throughout the years ranges from areas in high energy physics to neurophysiology and marine biology, with most experience in understanding the brain functions in vision, olfaction, and in nonlinear neural dynamics. In late 90s and early 2000s, I proposed a theory (which is being extensively tested) that the primary visual cortex in the primate brain creates a saliency map to automatically attract visual attention to salient visual locations. I am the author of Understanding Vision: theory, models, and data , Oxford University Press, 2014.