LIP External Colloquium: Viola Störmer - More than meets the eye: How context shapes what we see and remember

Viola Störmer, Dartmouth College, USA, -

More than meets the eye: How context shapes what we see and remember

An enormous amount of information is transmitted to the brain through our eyes, ears, and other senses, often exceeding our mind’s limited processing capacity. At the same time, inputs are frequently noisy and ambiguous, requiring complex inferences to extract meaning. How does the human mind solve this puzzle and construct behaviorally useful representations from the continuous stream of sensory data?

In this talk, I will discuss the importance of auditory and conceptual information in shaping visual-cognitive processes. First, I will demonstrate that auxiliary sounds influence the perception of visual objects, revealing a strong influence of cross-modal context in visual experience. Second, I will show how perceptual representations interface with higher-level conceptual knowledge, demonstrating that semantic understanding plays a significant role in determining perceptual capacity limits — such as how much information can be maintained in visual working memory. Throughout the talk, I will emphasize a central theme of my work: to fully understand perceptual-cognitive abilities, it is important to extend work on simple stimuli within a single modality to account for the complexities of our multisensory and conceptually rich environment.

Join on-site or hybrid:

https://mpib-berlin.webex.com/mpib-berlin/j.php?MTID=ma2c5826ff4652473eedcdd6b3355d0cb

Meeting number: 2741 068 3810

Password: meFpSJyJ623