The body inside out: From experience to perception and back

Professor Beatrice de Gelder presents her group's research, challenging conventional theories by building bridges between classical body perception and innate priors in the human visual system. Her approach jointly addresses category selectivity and functional roles of neural areas in body perception. Professor De Gelder aims to identify midlevel visual processes between high-order symbolic thought and low-level physical ones, serving as biological building blocks for complex whole-body expressions. Her talk covers conscious and non-conscious visual perception in patients with cortical damage, face recognition and its deficits, whole body posture and movement perception, and emotional expression in whole bodies. She explores neuroethological priors in body perception and social interaction, comparing social communication in human and non-human primates. Professor De Gelder's research aims to uncover the neural determinants of nonverbal communication, offering new perspectives on how the brain perceives and interprets bodies and social signals.

Beatrice de Gelder is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, and a member of the Maastricht Brain Imaging Centre (M-BIC). Prior to her current assignments, she was a Senior Scientist at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Harvard University. She received an MA in Philosophy, an MA in Experimental Psychology and a PhD in Philosophy from Louvain University in Belgium. Her current research focuses on face and body recognition and, recently, on the neuroscience of art. Her research has resulted in over 320 peer-reviewed articles and 25 invited chapters. She has authored or co-authored four professional books including her book on Emotions and the Body, Oxford University Press (2016). Popular contributions include an invited article in Scientific American expanding on the broad impact of her work on unconscious vision (2010, updated in 2017). She currently holds an ERC-synergy grant.

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Arts West, level 1, Forum Theatre, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

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