Our results thus support the hypothesis that relational coding plays an important functional role in perception and our shared visual world.
However, our paper refutes this notion by showing that what remains most stable across individuals’ brains are the similarity structures -- the set of similarities and dissimilarities between activation patterns of each image to other images from the same category (see figure).
Our paper addresses the fundamental question: Why do we all perceive the world in a largely similar manner? One would assume that this is because identical visual images elicit similar patterns of activations in different brains.
I am pleased to share that together with the brilliant team of Ofer Lipman, @Doronfried1179 and @OrYacov from Reichman University and @ShanyGrossman from MPI for Human Development and Hamburg University, our study was just published in Nat Commun
🔗 doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-6…
We are delighted to share that our paper, a joint work with the brilliant @ShohamAdva , @rotembroday, Galit Yovel and Itay Yaron from @TelAvivUni has now been published in Communication Biology nature.com/articles/s42003-0…
We are pleased to share that our paper (Galit Yovel), in collaboration with THE A-team: @rotembroday, @ItayYaron, and @MalachLab, has now been published in @CommsBio: doi.org/10.1038/s42003-025-0…
Rafael Malach Lab retweeted
Nachum's new book Natural Neuroscience is out! A fresh take on how brains work in the real world—well worth a read.
As can be seen, the receptive field structure of entorhinal neurons resembles the basis functions of JPEG, suggesting a form of lossy representation of space in the entorhinal cortex. (4/4)
We illustrate this point, among other examples, by noting a surprising similarity between entorhinal grid cells and the widely used information compression algorithm JPEG (Figure 3, see next). (3/4)
precisely because they are so different, significant similarities that can be found between brain and engineered system are likely to be informative. (2/4)
Artificial systems are so different from the brain — can they be informative about brain function?
In our perspective with @SimonyErez and @ShanyGrossman, now in PNAS (pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.23…), we borrow the concept of convergent evolution and argue that, paradoxically, (1/4)
and here is a proper link to the preprint : arxiv.org/abs/2407.08714
check it out!
These results help explain the substantial similarity in perceptual judgments that are observed across individuals. They further point to relational coding as a fundamental representational principle in high order human visual areas.
Our results show that what remains invariant across brains is not the activation patterns (population vectors), commonly considered the “work horse” of visual representations, but rather the similarity structure (relational coding) which emerges between these patterns (see fig)
Together with the superb Reichman University group: Ofer Lipman, @Doronfried1779 and Yacov Hel-Or and our group’s brilliant alumni @ShanyGrossman, we explored this question by studying intracranial recordings from the visual cortex of patients undergoing clinical diagnosis.
Why do we all perceive the world in a (largely) similar manner?
This question is not only interesting from a social-neuroscience point of view, but addresses the fundamental issue of neuronal representations of perceptual content in the human brain.
New preprint arXiv:2407.08714