Harvard Medical School develops AI to see visual cortex’s preferences
Why do our eyes tend to be drawn more to some shapes, colors, and silhouettes than others? For more than half a century, researchers have known that neurons in the brain’s visual system respond unequally to different images — a feature that is critical for the ability to recognize, understand, and interpret the multitude of visual clues surrounding us. For example, specific populations of visual neurons in an area of the brain known as the inferior temporal cortex fire more when people or other primates — animals with highly attuned visual systems — look at faces, places, objects, or text. But exactly what these neurons are responding to has remained unclear. Now a small study in macaques led by investigators in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School has generated some valuable clues based on an artificial intelligence system that can reliably determine what neurons in the brain’s visual cortex prefer to...