Neural dynamics at successive stages of the ventral visual stream are consistent with hierarchical error signals
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States
Abstract
Ventral visual stream neural responses are dynamic, even for static image presentations. However, dynamical neural models of visual cortex are lacking as most progress has been made modeling static, time-averaged responses. Here, we studied population neural dynamics during face detection across three cortical processing stages. Remarkably, ~30 milliseconds after the initially evoked response, we found that neurons in intermediate level areas decreased their responses to typical configurations of their preferred face parts relative to their response for atypical configurations even while neurons in higher areas achieved and maintained a preference for typical configurations. These hierarchical neural dynamics were inconsistent with standard feedforward circuits. Rather, recurrent models computing prediction errors between stages captured the observed temporal signatures. This model of neural dynamics, which simply augments the standard feedforward model of online vision, suggests that neural responses to static images may encode top-down prediction errors in addition to bottom-up feature estimates.
Data availability
All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in the supporting files for the manuscript. Source data files have been provided for Figures 1-5, and code for computational models in Figures 5 & 6 is provided.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institutes of Health (R01-EY014970)
- Jim DiCarlo
National Institutes of Health (K99-EY022671)
- Elias B Issa
National Institutes of Health (F32-EY019609)
- Elias B Issa
National Institutes of Health (F32-EY022845)
- Charles F Cadieu
Office of Naval Research (MURI-114407)
- Jim DiCarlo
McGovern Institute for Brain Research
- Jim DiCarlo
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All procedures were performed in compliance with National Institutes of Health guidelines and the standards of the MIT Committee on Animal Care (IACUC protocol #0111-003-14) and the American Physiological Society.
Copyright
© 2018, Issa et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Neural dynamics at successive stages of the ventral visual stream are consistent with hierarchical error signals
eLife 7:e42870.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.42870
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