4. Cognitive Neuroscience Methods I

The lecture explores David Marr's computational theory of mind and brain, emphasizing the importance of understanding what is computed and why, using color vision and face perception as case studies. Color vision is presented as an ill-posed problem where the light reaching our eyes (luminance) is a product of an object's surface properties (reflectance) and the incident light, requiring the brain to make assumptions to infer the object's true color. An experiment involving color perception of cars under different lighting conditions demonstrates how the visual system infers the color of incident light to solve this problem. The lecture transitions to face perception, highlighting the challenge of recognizing faces due to the vast variability in images and introduces functional MRI as a method to study brain activity related to face recognition.