​​Psychology Seminar | From percepts to concepts: Understanding category selectivity for animals and objects 

We maintain stable representations of the world via interactions of incoming sensory input and existing conceptual knowledge about the world. Distinct concepts, such as animate and inanimate entities, often share vast and systematic differences in visual features. As the brain transforms percepts into concepts, to what extent the mental and neural representations contain visual vs. conceptual information? In this talk, I will present behavioral and neural evidence that the well-documented distinction between animal and object representations are unlikely merely due to differences in low-level visual or shape properties. lvement of higher-level conceptual influences may play a critical role for interpreting visual input during categorization.