In this talk I will discuss insights from our recent work probing the neural mechanisms underlying conscious visual perception in humans by leveraging multimodal neuroimaging and computational approaches. I will focus on the roles of slow cortical potentials and spontaneous ongoing brain activity as revealed by our recent empirical work. I will additionally discuss our work comparing human and machine vision, which reveals persistent and systematic gaps between humans and state-of-the-art AI systems. Finally, I will discuss neural and computational mechanisms underpinning humans’ one-shot learning capability in visual perception.