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SeminarPast EventNeuroscience

Top-down Modulation in Human Visual Cortex

Mohamed Abdelhack

Dr

Washington University in St. Louis

Schedule
Thursday, December 17, 2020

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Schedule

Thursday, December 17, 2020

3:00 PM Europe/London

Host: SONA

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Event Information

Domain

Neuroscience

Original Event

View source

Host

SONA

Duration

70 minutes

Abstract

Human vision flaunts a remarkable ability to recognize objects in the surrounding environment even in the absence of complete visual representation of these objects. This process is done almost intuitively and it was not until scientists had to tackle this problem in computer vision that they noticed its complexity. While current advances in artificial vision systems have made great strides exceeding human level in normal vision tasks, it has yet to achieve a similar robustness level. One cause of this robustness is the extensive connectivity that is not limited to a feedforward hierarchical pathway similar to the current state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural networks but also comprises recurrent and top-down connections. They allow the human brain to enhance the neural representations of degraded images in concordance with meaningful representations stored in memory. The mechanisms by which these different pathways interact are still not understood. In this seminar, studies concerning the effect of recurrent and top-down modulation on the neural representations resulting from viewing blurred images will be presented. Those studies attempted to uncover the role of recurrent and top-down connections in human vision. The results presented challenge the notion of predictive coding as a mechanism for top-down modulation of visual information during natural vision. They show that neural representation enhancement (sharpening) appears to be a more dominant process of different levels of visual hierarchy. They also show that inference in visual recognition is achieved through a Bayesian process between incoming visual information and priors from deeper processing regions in the brain.

Topics

bayesian inferenceblurred imagesconnectivityneural representationspredictive codingrecurrent connectionstop-down modulationvisual cortexvisual recognition

About the Speaker

Mohamed Abdelhack

Dr

Washington University in St. Louis

Contact & Resources

Personal Website

www.researchgate.net/profile/Mohamed_Abdelhack

@SONAorg

Follow on Twitter/X

twitter.com/SONAorg

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