A lecture from psychology professor Irina Harris about the limits of conscious perception.
Our eyes and brains take in a large amount of visual information in one instant, but we are only consciously aware of a fraction of this information due to attentional bottlenecks that limit the number of things we can attend to simultaneously and the relative sluggishness of our cognitive processes. As a result, we are effectively “blind” to many things that are not our immediate focus of attention or are beyond our cognitive resolution. In this talk, I will discuss some common failures of conscious perception, as well as evidence that we nevertheless process a fair amount of information that does not reach conscious awareness. These findings raise questions about what it means to “see”. I will also touch on how advances in computer vision and AI could break through the limits of biological visual systems and provide “perfect vision”.
"Visions Cultures" is convened by Mark Ledbury and Nick Croggon as part of the Power Institute’s philanthropically funded Visual Understanding Initiative.
People
Irina Harris
Irina Harris has a BSc (Hons) in Psychology from UNSW, a Masters of Clinical Neuropsychology from Macquarie University and a PhD in Medicine from the University of Sydney. She is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Sydney, where she studies vision and memory using a combination of cognitive experimentation, neuroimaging and brain stimulation, and she has a long-standing interest in how we perceive objects and how attention (and failure of attention) shapes our perception. She was the recipient of three fellowships and several grants from the Australian Research Council that supported her research on the cognitive and neural mechanisms of object perception.
Related
Wed, 9 April 2025
5:00PM
Seeing underwater
Alexandre Cardaillac and Daniela Helbig
Wed, 5 March 2025
1:00PM
Colour Science
Paul Martin and Madeleine Kelly
