The Many Faces of Blindsight Seminar
- Time:
- 16:00 - 17:00
- Date:
- 20 March 2014
- Venue:
- Psychology Department Room 3095, Building 44 (Shackleton) Highfield Campus Southampton SO17 1BJ
For more information regarding this seminar, please telephone Allyson Marchi on 02380 599645 or email A.Marchi@soton.ac.uk .
Event details
Destruction of the brain's primary visual areas leads to blindness of cortical origin. Following destruction of this region, some patients remain capable of correctly guessing certain visual features even though they claim not to have seen the stimuli.
Destruction of the brain's primary visual areas leads to blindness of cortical origin. Following destruction of this region, some patients remain capable of correctly guessing certain visual features even though they claim not to have seen the stimuli. More puzzling still, a form of "affective blindsight" has been described in which emotional qualities are guessed above chance. The regions and pathways involved in blindsight in general, and affective blindsight in particular, are still unclear but the prevailing view for emotional stimuli is that of a rapid colliculo-pulvino-amydgala pathway.
In this talk, I will present a series of studies carried out on a cortically blind patient, as well as a group of healthy controls using EEG and fMRI. These investigations reveal that there is as much evidence arguing against, as there is data confirming, the existence of a rapid subcortical pathway for nonconscious visual processing.
Speaker information
Professor Alan Pegna , University of Geneva, Switzerland. The Laboratory of Experimental Neuropsychology studies different aspects of normal and pathological brain function using behavioural and brain imaging techniques (EEG and fMRI) in healthy and brain-damaged patients. The topics investigated including higher-level visual function, as well as emotional and language processing.