Understanding the Functional Mechanisms of Visual Performance

Time/Room: Wednesday, May 5, 2010, 12:00 – 1:30 pm, Broward County Convention Center, Fort Lauderdale, FL
Organizers: David R. Williams, Wilson S. Geisler
Speakers: David H. Brainard, Martin S. Banks, David J. Heeger

Every year, VSS and ARVO collaborate in a symposium – VSS at ARVO or ARVO at VSS – designed to highlight
and present work from one society at the annual meeting of the other. This year’s symposium is at ARVO.

In recent years, considerable progress has been made in understanding the functional mechanisms underlying
human visual performance. This progress has been achieved by attacking the same questions from different
directions using a variety of rigorous approaches, including careful psychophysics, functional imaging,
computational analysis, analysis of natural tasks and natural scene statistics, and the development of theories
of optimal Bayesian performance. This symposium highlights some of the exciting recent progress that has
been made by combining two or more of these approaches in addressing fundamental issues in color coding,
distance coding and object recognition.