Visual Duplicity - Action without Perception in the human visual system

Dr Melvyn A. Goodale.

Canada Research Chair in Visual Neuroscience (Joint Appointment with Psychology), Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.

Back in October 2006 CRS were honoured to sponsor the 14th Kanizsa Lecture during the Trieste Symposium on Perception and Cognition at the University of Trieste, Italy. The lecture was taken by Dr Melvyn Goodale of the University of Western Ontario and can be watched in full here. Scroll down to find out more about Dr Goodale and his work.

Click here to listen to the talk

Click the image above to view the sildes, and listen to Melvyn Goodale's talk, which was recorded live. The talk is about 90 minutes long. This presentation has been converted into a Flash file and uses streaming technology, so that you can start watching without waiting for the entire file to download. The presentation will open in a new window and run from start to end automatically, or you can use the controls in the top right corner to pause and navigate from slide to slide if you prefer. We apologise for the initial lack of sound quality, it does clear up so please bear with it!

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Summary

Dr Goodale presents us with some of his work supporting the concept of two separate, but interacting visual pathways in the human cerebral cortex. He reviews a range of behavioural experiments and fMRI studies in both normal observers and individuals with brain damage that have provided important insights into the organization of these two pathways, one for visual perception and another for the visual control of action. He describes the division of labour between the two visual systems and goes on to consider why two separate visual pathways emerged in the human brain.

Dr Melvyn A. Goodale

Dr Goodale completed his Ph.D in Psychology at the University of Western Ontario after which he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Oxford University. Following a position in the School of Psychology at the University of St. Andews, he returned to the University of Western Ontario in 1977 where he now holds the Canda Research Chair in Visual Neuroscience in the Departments of Psychology and Physiology.

In addition to his research activities, he has been active in developing the graduate program in Neuroscience at Western Ontario, for which he was awarded the prestigious E.G. Pleva Award for Contributions to Teaching in 1994. Dr. Goodale serves on the editorial board of a number of journals including Experimental Brain Research, Neuropsychologia, Brain and Mind, and Behavioural Brain Research. He is the past-President of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. In 1999 he was awarded the D.O Hebb Award by the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science in recognition of his distinguished scientific achievements. In 2001, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Research Interests:

Prof. Goodale is best known for his work on the functional organization of the visual pathways in the cerebral cortex, and was a pioneer in the study of visuomotor control in neurological patients. His recent research uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at the activity in the normal human brain as it performs different kinds of visual tasks. He has also developed virtual-object technology to study the visual information used to program and control grasping movements. Dr. Goodale holds major research grants from both the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. He is currently Director of the CIHR Group on Action and Perception.

His recent book with David Milner, 'The Visual Brain in Action' (Oxford University Press), has been quite influential. In it, he and Milner provide compelling arguments that the brain mechanisms underlying our conscious visual experience of the world are quite separate from those involved in the visual control of skilled actions. These ideas not only have implications for our understanding visual deficits in neurological patients, but also offer some new directions for the design of robots and artificial visual systems.

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