"A wing would be a most mystifying structure if one did not know that birds flew"
-Horace Barlow, 1961.
April, 2019 - Present
PhD research project with Dr. SP Arun, Vision Lab, Centre for Neuroscience, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
We can easily figure out the shape of a pattern even after deformations of its underlying surface. How does our brain know that these two conditions are similar even though they have drastic differences in their retinal projections? Is there any particular perceptual parameter that our brain computes for such conditions to arrive at this inference? Do neurons in our higher visual areas, combine patterns and surfaces differently when they are overlaid on versus disjointed from each other?
We try to find answers to these questions by employing psychophysical experiments on human participants and recording single neuron activities from macaque's visual and decision-making regions of the brain.
February, 2021 - Present
PhD research project with Dr. SP Arun, Vision Lab, Centre for Neuroscience, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
Do macaques have certain inherent beliefs about how objects should interact in the physical world? Do they get surprised if events don’t obey these physical laws of nature? How does our visual system help us predict unfolding of physical events? For example, when we see a ball dropping on a smooth surface, we can predict the bounce path of the ball even before the event has occurred. How do we achieve such feat?
To find these answers, we trained Bonnet macaques on a variety of cognitive tasks to find out - (1) if they also have such prior beliefs regarding the world and (2) how neural information between visual and decision-making regions of the brain help predict such events.