David Huber ’91 will be giving a colloquium in Bronfman 105 on November 7 at 4:00 pm.
In addition to our regular colloquium on November 8, we encourage everyone to attend this Psychology and Cognitive Science sponsored talk. David Huber is a cognitive psychologist, but his work is very computational.
Here is a brief description of his talk:
Don’t move your eyes for 5 seconds and then close your eyes. What you see behind your closed eyelids is a visual afterimage in which white becomes black and black becomes white. This occurs because visual neurons become habituated by overexposure. This same form of habituation is found throughout the brain. Dr. Huber’s research has documented ‘afterimages’ beyond the domain of vision, such as when the meaning of a word is semantically satiated by repeatedly thinking about the same word. In this talk, Dr. Huber presents evidence that habituation is not just neural fatigue – instead, it is the brain’s trick for separating appreciation of the current moment from any lingering thoughts and perceptions from the previous moment.