- At the beginning of the discussion, Eric Kandel says that visual perception does not work as a camera works. This is discussed throughout the talk. What is meant by this? In what ways is vision not like how a camera works?
- According to Tony Movshon, the eye itself is very similar to a camera. In what ways?
- The seminal work of Hubel and Wiesel is discussed. What did Hubel and Wiesel do? Why did they do this work? What did they discover?
- What is a receptive field?
- What stimulus do photoreceptors in the retina respond to? What stimulus do cells in the early visual cortex respond to?
- What does Eric Kandel mean by hierarchical processing in the visual system? How does the work of Hubel and Wiesel demonstrate this principle?
- What do the researchers mean when they talk about localization of function in the visual system? Nancy Kanwisher discusses the evidence for this. What is the evidence that she presents?
- Pawan Sinha talks about the work he has done with blind children in India, named Project Prakash. What was the work his team did and why was it important in teaching us about how the visual system works? In other words, what did they discover about how newly sighted children see the world? Do they see the world in the same way as those with normal vision?
- Ted Adelson talks about how the brain is doing detective work on the incoming sensory signals and he uses a stimulus (the dalmatian dog) to illustrate this. Explain what he means when he says the brain is doing detective work. Why is the image on the retina ambiguous? What is the brain doing with that incoming ambiguous information?
- Pawan Sinha talks about “the programs for learning vision” in the context of his work with Project Prakash. Can these programs be activated later in life after infancy? What is the evidence for this that he presents?
- The researchers discuss the problem of creating computers that have vision. What are the problems? How does our visual system compare to the visual system of current computers with recognizing faces?
- Towards the end of the discussion, the researchers talk about how much of our visual system is genetically determined. Is everything determined genetically? What evidence is there for neural plasticity, or the brain changing due to experience and not to genetics?
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