The course aims at providing a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary, overview of visual information processing. This includes the neuroanatomical structure of the visual system, in depth coverage of neural coding at different levels, psychophysical characterization of processes, and cognitive aspects of visual pattern representations. After this course, you will be able to (1) describe and compare contemporary theories of visual information processing, (2) analyze and evaluate key findings in the domain of visual information processing, and (3) apply contemporary theories of visual information processing to existing as well as new visual phenomena.

Neurobiological aspects. Topics covered will be the neurophysiological and neuroanatomical properties of the retino-cortical pathway. In addition, processing in the ventral/dorsal streams as well as neural correlates of top-down processes, the neural basis of movement detection and colour vision.

Functional aspects. Psychophysical and empirical paradigms that are employed to investigate mental representations of visual patterns will be covered, as well as integrative theoretical paradigms, starting from structural descriptions of these mental representations.

Theoretical/quantitative aspects. Recent models of self-organization in the visual pathway will be dealt with, starting with the development of neuronal connectivity in the retina, up to models for the emergence of feature-selectivity in the visual cortex.