The visual cortex, located at the occipital end of the brain, processes sensory input from the eyes. When a person is blindfolded, no light reaches the retina, leaving the visual cortex without visual input to process. However, our findings show that complex sound scenes (e.g. traffic noise, forest sounds, people), processed in the auditory cortex, can modulate the activity in the visual cortex. This multisensory interaction between the auditory and visual cortices is stronger in individuals who are congenitally blind and weaker in those with conditions of aphantasia - blind imagination.

SfN Conference 2023 - Our Group's Exciting Contributions

Our group had a great time at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) conference in Washington D.C., presenting two posters showcasing our innovative research on predictive coding mechanisms and contextual feedback signals during visual imagery. We're excited to share these findings with the scientific community!

Read more on our website below:

OHBM BrainHackathon: Right before OHBM (June 16-18th), Queen Margaret Union will host the OHBM BrainHack 2022, an event for anyone interested in brains to work collaboratively on common projects and learn about new ideas and tools in open science. This year the OHBM Brainhack will be a hybrid event with an in-person part in Glasgow (QMU) and three virtual hubs (Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia-Pacific). Still few places available!

The promise of artificial intelligence in understanding biological vision relies on the comparison of computational models with brain data with the goal of capturing functional principles of visual information processing. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have successfully matched the transformations in hierarchical processing occurring along the brain’s feedforward visual pathway extending into ventral temporal cortex. However, we are still to learn if CNNs can successfully describe feedback processes in early visual cortex. Here, we investigated similarities between human early visual cortex and a CNN with encoder/decoder architecture, trained with self-supervised learning to fill occlusions and reconstruct an unseen image. Using Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA), we compared 3T fMRI data from a non-stimulated patch of early visual cortex in human participants viewing partially occluded images, with the different CNN layer activations from the same images.

Lars will speak at the POEM workshop (Priors, Evidence and Memory: Dynamics of Predictive Processing) at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (Germany), organized by Prof. Yee Lee Shing and the LISCO lab. He will also present in Paris, at the Human Brain Project CORTICON Symposium: From Cortical Microcircuits to Consciousness, chaired by Walter Senn and Alain Destexhe.

Lars will present at the Virtual Brain Meeting at Imperial College London, speaking about 'Layers of primary visual cortex as a window into internal models about predicted and simulated environments'.