[visionlist] The 31st Kanizsa Lecture and the Trieste Symposium on Perception and Cognition

[Trieste Symposium]

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             TRIESTE SYMPOSIUM ON PERCEPTION AND COGNITION



                                  AND



                      THE 31st KANIZSA LECTURE



                        (first announcement)



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Dear colleagues,



the Trieste Symposium on Perception and Cognition and the 31st Kanizsa
Lecture will take place at the University of Trieste, October 27, 2023,
starting at 9.30 am.



Traditionally, the Symposium is open to all perspectives and approaches,
has no registration fee, and runs on an informal, relaxed pace.



This year the Kanizsa Lecture will be delivered by prof. Phil Kellman
(University of California Los Angeles) on Friday 27 October, starting at
4.00 pm.

In the academic year 2023-24 the University of Trieste celebrates 100
years. To celebrate this anniversary, we have organised an exhibition of
the scientific and artistic work of Gaetano Kanizsa. We will be glad to
take the attendances through the exhibition after the symposium.



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The 31st Kanizsa Lecture



>From Fragments to Objects: Understanding Visual Completion in Object
Perception


Perceiving objects and their properties is crucial to thought and action.
Through vision, our most powerful sense for obtaining knowledge of objects,
we are somehow able to perceive complete objects despite fragmentary
optical inputs due to occlusion and camouflage. How is this accomplished? I
will describe a progression from several decades of work by many
researchers to recent research and theory that suggests a coherent,
integrated account of the processes that produce perception of complete
objects of determinate shape despite spatial gaps in the input. This
account incorporates well-understood properties of distinguishable and
complementary contour and surface interpolation processes, and also fits
with a variety of phenomena suggesting additional scene constraints that
modulate the strength of visual completion. Persisting controversies about
how these fit together may be resolved by distinguishing two processes. An
automatic contour-linking process that connects edges based on geometric
relations in 2D, 3D, and spatiotemporal inputs produces an intermediate
representation that is prior to perceptual experience. A subsequent scene
description process sustains, weakens, or even deletes linkages in the
intermediate representation based on a number of interacting scene
constraints. The outputs of the scene description process determine
perceptual experience. I will show experimentally how this approach helps
to understand path detection, a perceptual phenomenon that has been poorly
understood, and connects it to phenomena of modal and amodal completion. I
will also describe recent research that reveals some of the workings of the
scene description process. Evidence suggests that scene constraints that
modulate perception of interpolated edges combine in a simple additive
fashion, but only for linkages encoded in the contour-linking process.
These findings indicate the importance of computations on intermediate
representations in perception and also illustrate the kinds of evidence
that can be used to reveal them. The approach also suggests that general
theories of perception emphasizing automated perceptual mechanisms and
those invoking more open-ended interactions of multiple constraints are
both correct in describing different aspects of object formation.


Phil Kellman

Distinguish Professor

University of California - Los Angeles


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Besides the KL the Symposium will a talks session on Friday. If you wish to
contribute a presentation, please submit your proposal by electronic mail
to trieste.symposium at gmail.com . Each proposal should be submitted as an
abstract (250-400 words). Proposal will be evaluated by a scientific
committee.

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: TUESDAY 10 OCTOBER, 2023.

More information about the program will follow.

GUIDELINES FOR THE AUTHORS:

Talk (in English): 15-20 minutes for each presentation (details will be
communicated in the final program).

The guided tour of Gaetano Kanizsa's exhibition will take place from 12 am
to 1 pm.

Paolo Bernardis
Carlo Fantoni
Walter Gerbino

organizers
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