Dr Alex Clarke (Cambridge): 'Context modulates object recognition in the lab and real world' School of Psychology and Neuroscience Seminar

Recognising a visual object depends on accessing semantic meaning from our visual inputs – but in the real world, our understanding of what we see is also shaped by our environment. When we see an object, we are already in a complex and rich environment, and this leads to expectations about the things we are likely to see. In this talk, I'll present our recent neuroimaging work on how memory-guided expectations impact our sensory processing, how the semantic processing of visual objects is shaped by the prior scene context, and finish by outlining the ways we can utilise emerging mixed-reality and mobile brain imaging technologies to study perception in real-world settings, unconstrained by the lab.