Talia and I discuss her work on how our visual system is organized topographically, and divides into three main categories: big inanimate things, small inanimate things, and animals. Her work is unique in that it focuses not on the classic hierarchical processing of vision (though she does that, too), but what kinds of things are represented along that hierarchy. She also uses deep networks to learn more about the visual system. We also talk about her keynote talk at the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience conference and plenty more.

Show notes:

• Talia’s lab website.
• Follow her on twitter: @talia_konkle.
• Check out the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience conference, where she'll give a keynote address.
• Papers we discuss/reference:
  • Early work on the tripartite organization. Tripartite Organization of the Ventral Stream by Animacy and Object Size.
  • A more recent update, with the texforms we discuss and comparision too deep learning CNN networks used to model the ventral visual stream. Mid-level visual features underlie the high-level categorical organization of the ventral stream.
• The article Talia references about an elegant solution to an old problem in computer science.