Contributed Talk Sessions | Poster Sessions | All Posters | Search Papers

Contributed Talk Session: Friday, August 15, 12:00 – 1:00 pm, Room C1.04
Poster Session C: Friday, August 15, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

A hierarchy of spatial predictions across human visual cortex during natural vision

Wieger H. Scheurer1, Micha Heilbron2; 1Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, 2University of Amsterdam

Presenter: Wieger H. Scheurer

The predictive processing framework posits that the brain constantly compares incoming sensory signals with self-generated predictions. However, evidence for prediction in sensory cortex mostly comes from artificial paradigms with simple, highly predictable stimuli, leaving it unclear whether the reported sensory prediction effects generalise to perception more broadly. Here, we probe predictions in naturalistic perception, analysing high-resolution 7T functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) responses of human participants viewing tens of thousands natural scenes. We use deep generative models to quantify the inherent spatial predictability of image patches, and relate resulting estimates to brain activity. Our results reveal robust and widespread predictability modulations of BOLD responses across the visual cortex. Higher visual areas were sensitive to more high-level predictability, forming a prediction hierarchy. Effects were stronger in voxels with higher eccentricity receptive fields, aligning with predictive coding and Bayesian theories. These results demonstrate the ubiquity of prediction in vision and inform neurocomputational models of predictive coding and self-supervised learning in the brain.

Topic Area: Visual Processing & Computational Vision

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF