"'The whole is other than the sum of the parts." - Kurt Koffka

Our conscious experience is a meaningful scene composed of distinct objects and surfaces and their interrelations. This consciously perceived visual world is strikingly different from the unstructured mosaic of intensities and colors that stimulates the retina. Perceptual Organization (PO) is the process by which the disjoint bits of visual information are structured into the larger coherent units that eventually we experience as environmental objects. Inspired by the Gestalt psychologists who were the first to recognize the problem of PO, I have attempted to reveal the principles and the processes underlying visual perceptual organization. In this talk, I’ll focus on my recent work on the role of visual awareness in PO. 

Ruth (Rutie) Kimchi is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Haifa. She is the Director of the Institute of Information Processing and Decision Making (IIPDM) and was the Co-Director of the Max Wertheimer Minerva Center for Cognitive Processes and Human Performance, and the Chair of the department of Psychology.

Prof. Kimchi’s research has been mainly in the domain of visual cognition, with a special focus on visual perceptual organization, visual attention, global, local, and configural processing, and object and face perception and recognition. Using sophisticated behavioral experimental techniques with normal adults, children, and neurological patients, she seeks to reveal the principles and the processes by which the perceptual system structures visual information into coherent units that eventually we experience as objects in our environment. Find out more about Dr. Kimchi’s work here.

We thank the NSSR Dean's Office for their support of this series of events. For a list of upcoming speakers and discussions, please see the schedule.

Registered attendees will receive the Zoom link via email.