Project description
New imaging to explore neural mechanisms of top-down vision
What people see is shaped by what they expect to find. Spotting a red tomato at the supermarket relies on top-down processing in the visual cortex, though the precise mechanisms are unclear. The study uses a three-photon microscope to visualise neuronal activity in the visual cortex of conscious macaque monkeys. The ERC-funded TDVision project aims to explore the neural mechanisms of top-down vision using novel imaging techniques and behavioural tasks with macaque monkeys. It will focus on how neuronal populations in early visual areas are affected by top-down input. The project will analyse these neurons’ organisation and develop methods to identify their cell types and connectivity. Integrating these insights into neural network models offers a way to test new hypotheses about primate visual mechanisms.
Objective
What we see depends on what we have in mind. For example, we can quickly find tomatoes in the vegetable department of a supermarket by searching for red and round objects, making them stand out from the background. This is thought to be supported by top-down processing within the hierarchy of areas in the visual cortex, but the detailed neural mechanisms are still poorly understood, partly because of limitations in neural recording technologies. In my lab, we recently developed a three-photon microscope capable of visualizing the activity of large populations of individually-defined neurons in awake and behaving macaque monkeys. Combining this novel imaging modality with well-controlled behavioral tasks provides the exciting opportunity to investigate the neural mechanisms of generative vision at an unprecedented scale and level of detail. We will train macaque monkeys to search for shapes hidden in noisy texture elements, investigate the strategy used by the prefrontal cortex to encode the mental template to guide this search, and how this process warps the encoding of visual information in nearly complete local populations of neurons in early visual areas. We will investigate the topographic organization of the recorded population of neurons, and develop viral and histological tools to determine their cell types as well as their connectivity profiles. We will also use psychophysics to make a link to conscious perception in humans, investigating how a search template can warp perception. Finally, we will incorporate our empirical findings into artificial neural network models with interpretable circuit mechanisms. This is expected to bring the flexibility and robustness of generative vision into models of artificial intelligence, as well as provide a computational framework to define novel hypotheses about the detailed neural mechanisms of generative vision in primates, which we can subsequently test with both behavioral measures and in-vivo recordings.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences biological sciences zoology mammalogy primatology
- natural sciences physical sciences optics microscopy
- agricultural sciences agriculture, forestry, and fisheries agriculture horticulture vegetable growing
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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(opens in new window) ERC-2022-STG
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6525 XZ Nijmegen
Netherlands
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