| Title | Role of Expectation in What We See is Stronger than Previously Thought, Study Finds | |
| Date | Wednesday June 24 2020, @05:04PM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the I-see-what-you-didn't-do-there dept. | ||
Role of Expectation in What We See Is Stronger Than Previously Thought, Study Finds:
In the visual cortex, where the brain first begins building a picture of what your eyes are seeing, incoming information from the eyes merges with feedback signals containing contextual information originating from deeper in the brain. These feedback signals have long been considered merely “modulatory” – helping shift focus of attention to different parts of the visual field, for instance.
But in a new study in which [Andreas] Keller, fellow postdoc Morgane Roth, PhD, and Scanziani investigated what enables neurons in the visual system to respond to context when a stimulus is not available, they found that feedback from higher-order visual centers in the brain has much more influence over our fundamental visual processing than scientists had ever realized.
[...] “In other words – when there is nothing to see, the brain sees what it expects to see based on the context,” Keller said. “This work adds to a growing recognition of the brain as a ‘prediction machine.’ The simplest neurons of the visual cortex don’t just robotically process whatever data is coming in from the eye, but at the same time are comparing it to perhaps your whole visual life history to anticipate what you expect to see.”
Journal Reference:
Andreas J. Keller, Morgane M. Roth, Massimo Scanziani. Feedback generates a second receptive field in neurons of the visual cortex, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2319-4)
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printed from SoylentNews, Role of Expectation in What We See is Stronger than Previously Thought, Study Finds on 2023-07-18 02:05:17