Description du projet
Comprendre la spécialisation cérébrale
Des régions distinctes du cerveau remplissent des fonctions spécialisées, mais l’origine de cette spécialisation fonctionnelle reste insaisissable. Financé par le Conseil européen de la recherche, le projet DEEPFUNC vise à élucider les mystères entourant la spécialisation fonctionnelle dans le cerveau humain, en particulier dans la voie visuelle. Grâce à une approche pluridisciplinaire impliquant des réseaux neuronaux artificiels, les chercheurs étudieront les caractéristiques menant à la spécialisation fonctionnelle et exploreront l’impact de l’expérience visuelle sur le développement. La recherche vise à fournir de nouvelles informations sur la manière dont le cerveau est organisé en fonction des exigences de traitement complexes et dynamiques auxquelles il est confronté lorsqu’il s’agit d’activités et d’expériences de la vie quotidienne.
Objectif
Over the last few decades, neuroscientists have identified multiple brain regions that perform distinct, often highly specialized functions such as processing faces, understanding language, and even thinking about what other people are thinking. Despite our increased understanding of the computations performed in these regions, the precise causes and origins of functional specialization in the brain are still a mystery and not accessible to direct experimental approaches.
Here, we propose to combine cutting-edge computational modelling, large-scale sampling of naturalistic behaviour and human neuroimaging to overcome these limitations. Focusing on visual perception, we will exploit the latest advances in artificial neural networks to probe three critical aspects of functional specialization in the ventral visual pathway: First, by training networks on natural and artificial visual categories and identifying which features result in functional specialization, we will characterize what it is about a visual category that leads to functional specialization. Second, we will leverage large-scale egocentric datasets of infant and adult visual input to test how visual experience and natural input statistics shape functional specialization during development. Third, we will ask why certain neural features become specialized for high-level visual categories in the human visual cortex in the first place. Critically, for each of these aspects, we will close the loop and directly test and validate its predictions in the human brain.
Our project will shed light on functional specialization from a new angle – by relating functional specialization to the computational constraints of performing tasks in the real world. Using this novel approach, our project tackles some of the most fundamental questions about the functional organization of the human mind and brain – the what, how and why of functional specialization.
Champ scientifique
Mots‑clés
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsInstitution d’accueil
35390 Giessen
Allemagne