Vlad Ayzenberg
Departments of Psychology and Neuroscience
Temple University

Early developing mechanisms underlying visual object categorization

Humans learn new object categories rapidly, often after seeing just one example. Indeed, even infants exhibit remarkable categorization abilities in the absence of extensive experience. What are the underlying visual representations and neural mechanisms that support such robust categorization? In the current talk, I will combine approaches from developmental psychology with computational modelling to reveal the underlying representations that support object categorization in infants. I will also present fMRI and high-density EEG data that suggest that object categorization is supported by a broader network of brain regions beyond the ventral ‘what’ pathway – the pathway most associated with visual recognition. Finally, I will describe how my research with newborn infants and pediatric hemispherectomy patients – patients who have had an entire hemisphere removed – may shed light on the developmental trajectory of the neural regions underlying object categorization.