Theoretical Neuroscience Podcast On how vision works - with Li Zhaoping - #5
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Dec 9, 2023 
The guest, Li Zhaoping, discusses the theory of V1 as a 'saliency detector' in vision processing, directing gaze to important objects. The podcast explores the progression of feature detectors in visual processing, the limitations of human vision, and the role of attention selection in humans and animals. It also delves into the connection between visual movement in birds and mice and sensory systems, and interdisciplinary advancements in visual neuroscience.
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Basketball Gorillas Illustrate Attention
- People focusing on counting basketball passes often miss a gorilla walking through the scene.
- This demonstrates attentional blindness where focus on one task causes missing obvious events.
V1 as Saliency Detector
- V1 acts as a saliency detector that selects the most important spot in the visual field for attention.
- This selection guides eye movements to focus central vision on that salient location for detailed analysis.
Visual Information Bottleneck
- The brain processes about 1 megabyte of visual input per second but can only consciously process about 40 bits per second.
- Selecting which 40 bits to attend to is the key challenge of visual attention and perception.