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Personalized priors: How individual differences in internal models explain idiosyncrasies in natural vision

Descripción del proyecto

Cómo influyen los modelos internos en la idiosincrasia de la experiencia visual

En general, se considera que el encéfalo es un sistema predictivo que relaciona los estímulos sensoriales con modelos generados internamente sobre qué aspecto debería tener el mundo. Sin embargo, se sabe poco sobre las características de estos modelos internos y cómo difieren de una persona a otra. El equipo del proyecto PEP, financiado por el Consejo Europeo de Investigación, pretende explorar sistemáticamente el contenido de los modelos internos mediante el análisis metódico de dibujos hechos por distintas personas que representan escenas de la vida real. Las conclusiones recogidas constituirán la base de una amplia investigación cognitiva, neuronal y computacional para determinar cómo se relacionan los modelos internos con la experiencia visual y lingüística individual, la arquitectura funcional del encéfalo y la percepción de escenas.

Objetivo

In the cognitive and neural sciences, the brain is widely viewed as a predictive system. On this view, the brain conceives the world by comparing sensory inputs to internally generated models of what the world should look like. Despite this emphasis on internal models, their key properties are not well understood. We currently do not know what exactly is contained in our internal models and how these contents vary systematically across individuals. In the absence of suitable methods for assessing the contents of internal models, the predictive brain has essentially remained a black box.

Here, we develop a novel approach for opening this black box. Focusing on natural vision, we will use creative drawing methods to characterize internal models. Through the careful analysis of drawings of real-world scenes, we will distill out the contents of individual people’s internal models. These insights will form the basis for a comprehensive cognitive, neural, and computational investigation of natural vision on the individual level: First, we will establish how individual differences in the contents of internal models explain the efficiency of scene vision, on the behavioral and neural levels. Second, we will harness variations in people’s drawings to determine the critical features of internal models that guide scene vision. Third, we will enrich the currently best deep learning models of vision with information about internal models to obtain computational predictions for individual scene perception. Finally, we will systematically investigate how individual differences in internal models mimic idiosyncrasies in visual and linguistic experience, functional brain architecture, and scene exploration.

Our project will illuminate natural vision from a new angle – starting from a characterization of individual people’s internal models of the world. Through this change of perspective, we can make true progress in understanding what exactly is predicted in the predictive brain.

Institución de acogida

JUSTUS-LIEBIG-UNIVERSITAET GIESSEN
Aportación neta de la UEn
€ 1 484 625,00
Dirección
LUDWIGSTRASSE 23
35390 Giessen
Alemania

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Región
Hessen Gießen Gießen, Landkreis
Tipo de actividad
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Enlaces
Coste total
€ 1 484 625,00

Beneficiarios (1)