Topic: higher-order visual cortex

Learning general principles from single examples is a hallmark of high cognitive functions. This type of learning is computationally challenging for artificial agents, yet many animals such as primates can perform it with ease. To study one-exemplar generalization in the lab, it would be ideal to develop appropriate behavioral tasks in more tractable model organisms, such as rodents. Here we report that mice can perform one-exemplar generalization with difficult texture-based visual stimuli such as “leaves” and “rocks”. We trained mice to discriminate between single images from two texture cat

During decision-making, sensory input is integrated with internal priors to produce appropriate action. Theoretical work has proposed a hierarchical implementation of this process in visual cortex (Rao & Ballard 1999), but it remains unclear whether and how networks of visual cortical neurons might encode priors in a predictive manner. To investigate this, we trained mice on a standardised behavioural platform for visual decision-making (The International Brain Laboratory, 2023): mice turned a wheel to indicate whether a visual grating appeared on the left or the right, with prior probabil