Top-down perceptual inference shaping the activity of early visual cortex

Ferenc Csikor (), Balázs Meszéna, Katalin Ócsai and Gergő Orbán ()
Additional contact information
Ferenc Csikor: HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics
Balázs Meszéna: HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics
Katalin Ócsai: HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics
Gergő Orbán: HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics

Nature Communications, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-23

Abstract: Abstract Deep discriminative models provide remarkable insights into hierarchical processing in the brain by predicting neural activity along the visual pathway. However, these models differ from biological systems in their computational and architectural properties. Unlike biological systems, they require teaching signals for supervised learning. Moreover, they rely on feed-forward processing of stimuli, which contrasts with the extensive top-down connections in the ventral pathway. Here, we address both issues by developing a hierarchical deep generative model and show that it predicts an extensive set of experimental results in the primary and secondary visual cortices (V1 and V2). We show that the widely documented sensitivity of V2 neurons to textures is a consequence of learning a hierarchical representation of natural images. Further, we show that top-down influences are inherent to hierarchical inference. Hierarchical inference explains neural signatures of top-down interactions and reveals how higher-level representation shapes low-level representations through modulation of response mean and noise correlations in V1.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64967-x 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:16:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-025-64967-x

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

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-64967-x

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 ().