Guest Presenter: Dr. Marius Peelen (Principal Investigator at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Associate Professor in Sensorimotor Neuroscience at Radboud University)

Talk Title: Context-Based Object Recognition.

Abstract: Objects can be recognized based on local visual features, including object shape, color, and texture. In daily life, however, such features are often not clearly visible, for example when objects appear in the periphery, in clutter, or at a distance. Interestingly, object recognition can still be highly accurate under these conditions when objects are seen within their typical scene context. In this talk, I will present results from behavioral, fMRI, MEG, and TMS studies characterizing the neural mechanisms of context-based object recognition. Results show that expectations derived from scene context – processed in scene-selective cortex –disambiguate object representations in object-selective visual cortex, thereby supporting accurate object recognition despite the lack of recognizable local features.