University of Trieste · Department of Life Sciences
The annual keynote on perception and cognition, since 1993.
Each year, a leading researcher is invited to Trieste — or to a partner university — to give the Kanizsa Lecture: a public talk on visual perception and cognition, open to all and streamed online, held in memory of Gaetano Kanizsa.
Upcoming edition · 2026
"Predictive perception"
David C. Burr
Department of Neuroscience, Psychology, Pharmacology and Child Health, University of Florence, Italy
Over the past eight decades research on sensory systems has been largely dominated by a mechanistic, bottom-up approach, well illustrated by Hubel and Wiesel's Nobel Prize winning work. On the other hand, several psychologists, notably Gaetano Kanizsa, had a very different perspective, considering perception as an active, constructive process, where prediction plays an important role. While slow to catch on, this approach has recently become increasingly prominent in mainstream perception, with the advent of many techniques to understand and characterize the role of prediction in perception. One popular example is Serial Dependence, which demonstrates how perception can be biased by predictions based on recent stimulus history. Bayesian modeling shows how this bias leads to efficient perception, for a range of attributes, including numerosity, orientation, facial gender and expression. The bias acts at a low, sensory level, affecting perception itself, rather than merely perceptual decisions or responses. Much evidence suggests that the dependence on perceptual history may be mediated via alpha-frequency neural oscillations, akin to a "perceptual echo". Recent work shows that in natural viewing conditions, when moving objects pass behind occluders, predictive processes like serial dependence maintain a rich perceptual representation of the virtual trajectory of the occluded objects, as well as a detailed map of important features such as colour. Taken together, the work supports Kanizsa's general intuition that perception is a highly active, constructive process.
The name
The lecture takes its name from Gaetano Kanizsa, a Trieste-born psychologist whose research on perception — including the celebrated illusory-contour triangle that bears his name — shaped twentieth-century Gestalt psychology and anticipated the idea of perception as an active, constructive process. Kanizsa was also the author of graphic works, such as the one pictured alongside.
A selection of his artistic and scientific works, is permanently exhibited on the second floor of Building A on the Piazzale Europa campus, and is available online here -> link: www.gaetanokanizsa.it
Archive
Editions from 1993 to 2009 predate the department's online archive and are not yet linked here.
Contact
For programme information, to propose a contribution, or to join the mailing list, write to trieste.symposium@gmail.com.