Keynote Speakers
Perception Lecture (August 26th, 18.30-19.30 – Stazione Marittima)
Dejan Todorovic, University of Belgrade
Visual illusions and contextual effects
Bio
Dejan Todorović is a professor at the Department of Psychology and member of the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at the University of Belgrade. He holds an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Belgrade and a PhD degree in experimental psychology from the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He spent extended amounts of time at Boston University, Rutgers University in Newark, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Bielefeld. He gave the Kanizsa Lecture in 2013. He is a co-editor, with Arthur Shapiro, of the Oxford Compendium of Visual Illusions, Oxford University Press, 2017. His research interests include experimental studies, mathematical analyses, and computational models of perception of lightness, space, shape, pictures, and faces.
Kanizsa Lecture (August 27th, 16.00-17.00 – Stazione Marittima)
Walter Gerbino, University of Trieste
Perception and past experience 50 years after Kanizsa’s (im)possible experiment
Bio
The last ring of the chain of Kanizsa’s research assistants, Walter Gerbino started his academic career in Trieste, moved to Padua in the early Eighties, and then spent more than thirty years in Trieste as full professor, department head, and faculty dean. He retired from academic duties, but not from involvement in research, at the end of 2016. Walter’s scientific interests span perceptual organization, phenomenal transparency, amodal completion, visual attention, crossmodal integration, reading, and cognitive ergonomics. His main contributions to perceptual science include the demonstration of the effects of amodal completion on visual categorization; the discovery a a peculiar distortion in occluded angle perception; the luminance-based reformulation of Metelli’s model of achromatic transparency; the development and test of a field model of visual interpolation, grounded on Gestalt principles and variational in spirit (together with Carlo Fantoni); the analysis of visual biases related to occlusion indeterminacy in volume perception.
Rank Prize Lecture (August 27th, 17.30-18.30 – Stazione Marittima)
Branka Spehar, University of New South Wales
Fractals, Vision and Aesthetics
Bio
Branka Spehar is a Professor of Psychology at the School of Psychology, University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She completed her undergraduate degree and M.Sc. in Psychology at Zagreb University, Croatia and went on to obtain her PhD in Experimental Psychology at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA. She carried out post-doctoral research at the SUNY School of Optometry in New York before accepting a faculty appointment at UNSW. Her research interests include lightness and color perception, perceptual organisation, attentional capture and, most recently, the perceptual foundations of aesthetic experience. She is interested in the neural mechanisms underlying these processes, how are they affected by varying spatial and temporal context, how they develop in infants and children and how are they are tuned to the statistics and characteristics of natural images.
