Bevil Conway, Ph.D.

• Senior Investigator
• Section on Perception, Cognition, Action
• National Institutes of Health

Concepts: Origins & Mechanisms

The mechanisms that underlie concepts are a long-standing open question. I will take up three lines of research that aim to make the question tractable. First, I will discuss behavioral work in monkeys to determine whether they have consensus color categories (a classic “concept”). If they do, then language must not be a requirement.  If they do not, then the consensus color categories of humans are unlikely to depend innate mechanisms of visual encoding. Second, I’ll describe fMRI experiments in macaques in which we aimed to determine the brain areas that underlie color-shape associations that are the basis for object concepts (e.g., BANANA = “yellow crescent”). Two monkeys spent many years interacting with a set of 2-D colored objects, after which we scanned their brains while they held in mind object cues (color or shape) to identify the neural locus of the paired association. In additional experiments, we take advantage of top-down feedback to isolate areas responsible for the conscious perception of colors and color-shape binding. Finally, I will describe work in V1 that aims to recover spatial receptive fields at the center of gaze during active vision, providing (we think) the building blocks for learning concepts.

Faculty Host: Dr. Kristina Nielsen