Professor Fei-Fei Li co-publishes a Nature paper with Psychology colleagues.

June 8, 2009

In the true spirit of interdisciplinary research, Computer Science Dept Assistant Professor Fei-Fei Li and Psychology Department postdoc Dr. Marius Peelen and Professor Sabine Kastner have co-published a Nature paper, titled "Neural mechanisms of rapid natural scene categorization in human visual cortex". The full paper can be accessed at: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature08103.html

This study sheds light on a long standing puzzle in neuroscience -- the human visual system is extremely effective and efficient at categorizing complex natural scenes even without attending the scene, a phenomenon not predicted by well accepted theory of the visual mind. This previous finding was part of Prof. Li's dissertation work at Caltech in 2002. Since then, numerous experimental and theoretical studies have attempted to explain this finding. The recently published Nature paper sheds the first light on explaining this phenomenon by using fMRI techniques to find the first neural correlates in the brain for rapid scene categorization.