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

Contributed Talk Session: Friday, August 15, 12:00 – 1:00 pm, Room C1.03
Poster Session C: Friday, August 15, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Examining the potential functional significance of initially poor temporal acuity

Marin Vogelsang¹, Lukas Vogelsang¹, Pawan Sinha¹; ¹Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Presenter: Marin Vogelsang

The human visual system is remarkably immature at birth, exhibiting initially degraded spatial and temporal vision. While early spatial degradations have been proposed to provide important benefits to the developing visual system, less is known about the potential adaptive significance of early temporal immaturities. Here, we investigated this possibility computationally, using 3D convolutional neural networks trained on a temporally meaningful classification task. We systematically manipulated spatial and temporal blur when training on the Something-Something V2 dataset, which critically depends on temporal order. Analysis of learned receptive fields revealed that initial exposure to temporal blur led to longer-range temporal processing, persisting even after transitioning to clear temporal inputs. Such developmental trajectory commencing with initial temporal blur also significantly enhanced generalization performance compared to training with high temporal resolution input or corresponding spatial blur alone. These findings extend the concept of adaptive developmental degradations into the temporal domain, suggesting that immaturities in temporal vision may instantiate important mechanisms for robust perception later in life.

Topic Area: Visual Processing & Computational Vision

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF