Vision and Perception Club Seminar Series – Jake Yates, Ph.D.

“Neural Mechanisms of Active Visual Processing”

Jake Yates, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Vision Science and Optometry
University of California, Berkeley

In-Person
BiomedicalSciences Research Building 154 (BSRB 154)

For more information, please contact Dr. Alex Huk at AlexHuk@g.ucla.edu.
For more information, please contact Dr. Anne Churchland at AChurchland@mednet.ucla.edu.

Website: VPC Upcoming Meetings

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Abstract: Most of the core computational principles in visual neuroscience come from studies using fixating or anesthetized subjects. To overcome the limitations of fixation points, we recently developed a suite of hardware and software tools to study vision during naturalbehavior in untrained subjects. In this talk, I’ll describe our free-viewing approach to visual neuroscience and how this supports the first high-resolution measurements of cortical receptive fields (RFs) in the primate fovea. Although this approach supports detailed RF measurements, the goal of free-viewing experiments is to generate data under more natural conditions.The end product of a free-viewing experiment is a retinal movie that is aligned with the spike times and oculomotor behavior of the animal. Aligning on saccade times reveals large visual transients in V1 which have temporal latencies that depend on the spatiotemporal tuning of the neuron. Thus, active vision in marmosets consists of a dynamic temporal sequence of neural activity associated with visual sampling. Taken together, the free-viewingparadigm lays the foundations for research in visual neurophysiology that more directly relates to how primates interact with the visual world.