Primary visual cortex straightens natural video trajectories

Olivier J. Hénaff (), Yoon Bai (), Julie A. Charlton, Ian Nauhaus, Eero P. Simoncelli and Robbe L. T. Goris ()
Additional contact information
Olivier J. Hénaff: New York University
Yoon Bai: University of Texas at Austin
Julie A. Charlton: University of Texas at Austin
Ian Nauhaus: University of Texas at Austin
Eero P. Simoncelli: New York University
Robbe L. T. Goris: University of Texas at Austin

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-12

Abstract: Abstract Many sensory-driven behaviors rely on predictions about future states of the environment. Visual input typically evolves along complex temporal trajectories that are difficult to extrapolate. We test the hypothesis that spatial processing mechanisms in the early visual system facilitate prediction by constructing neural representations that follow straighter temporal trajectories. We recorded V1 population activity in anesthetized macaques while presenting static frames taken from brief video clips, and developed a procedure to measure the curvature of the associated neural population trajectory. We found that V1 populations straighten naturally occurring image sequences, but entangle artificial sequences that contain unnatural temporal transformations. We show that these effects arise in part from computational mechanisms that underlie the stimulus selectivity of V1 cells. Together, our findings reveal that the early visual system uses a set of specialized computations to build representations that can support prediction in the natural environment.

Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25939-z Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-25939-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-25939-z

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().