Abstract

To create a representation of the environment, the sensory systems collect and compute features in increasingly complex stages. The visual system, in particular, is capable of recognizing objects effortlessly in just a couple of hundred milliseconds. The primate brain recruits a specific set of brain regions to represent an object from low-level feature detection in the early visual cortex to high-level object categorization in the occipitotemporal cortex. Behavioral studies in dogs suggest that similarly to primates, canines encode high-level object categories from visual stimuli. However, early in evolution, the carnivore visual pathway diverged from the primate. The main objectives of my research are to localize where both low-level and high-level feature detection takes place in the dog brain compared to the human brain.