McIlreavy L., Fiser J. & Bex PJ. (2012) Impact of simulated central scotomas on visual search in natural scenes. Optometry and vision science: official publication of the American Academy of Optometry
In performing search tasks, the visual system encodes information across the visual field at a resolution inversely related to eccentricity and deploys saccades to place visually interesting targets upon the fovea, where resolution is highest. The serial process of fixation, punctuated by saccadic eye movements, continues until the desired target has been located. Loss of […]
Janacsek K., Fiser J. & Nemeth D. (2012) The best time to acquire new skills: age-related differences in implicit sequence learning across the human lifespan. Developmental science 15 (4), 496-505
Implicit skill learning underlies obtaining not only motor, but also cognitive and social skills through the life of an individual. Yet, the ontogenetic changes in humans’ implicit learning abilities have not yet been characterized, and, thus, their role in acquiring new knowledge efficiently during development is unknown. We investigated such learning across the lifespan, between […]
Fiser J., Lengyel M., Savin C., Orbán G., & Berkes P. (2013): How (not) to assess the importance of correlations for the matching of spontaneous and evoked activity arXiv preprint arXiv:1301.6554
A comment on `Population rate dynamics and multineuron firing patterns in sensory cortex’ by Okun et al. Journal of Neuroscience 32(48):17108-17119, 2012 and our response to the corresponding reply by Okun et al’s (arXiv, 2013). PDF
Nemeth D., Janacsek K. & Fiser J. (2013) Age-dependent and coordinated shift in performance between implicit and explicit skill learning. Frontiers in computational neuroscience 7, 147
It has been reported recently that while general sequence learning across ages conforms to the typical inverted-U shape pattern, with best performance in early adulthood, surprisingly, the basic ability of picking up in an implicit manner triplets that occur with high vs. low probability in the sequence is best before 12 years of age and […]
Christensen JH., Bex PJ. & Fiser J. (2015) Prior implicit knowledge shapes human threshold for orientation noise. Journal of vision 15 (9), 24-24
Although orientation coding in the human visual system has been researched with simple stimuli, little is known about how orientation information is represented while viewing complex images. We show that, similar to findings with simple Gabor textures, the visual system involuntarily discounts orientation noise in a wide range of natural images, and that this discounting […]
Roser ME., Aslin RN., McKenzie R., Zahra D. & Fiser J. (2015) Enhanced visual statistical learning in adults with autism. Neuropsychology 29 (2), 163
Objective: Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are often characterized as having social engagement and language deficiencies, but a sparing of visuospatial processing and short-term memory (STM), with some evidence of supranormal levels of performance in these domains. The present study expanded on this evidence by investigating the observational learning of visuospatial concepts from patterns […]
Haefner RM., Berkes P. & Fiser J. (2016) Perceptual decision-making as probabilistic inference by neural sampling. Neuron 90 (3), 649-660
We address two main challenges facing systems neuroscience today: understanding the nature and function of cortical feedback between sensory areas and of correlated variability. Starting from the old idea of perception as probabilistic inference, we show how to use knowledge of the physical task to make testable predictions for the influence of feedback signals on […]
Orbán G., Berkes P., Fiser J. & Lengyel M. (2016) Neural variability and sampling-based probabilistic representations in the visual cortex. Neuron 92 (2), 530-543
Neural responses in the visual cortex are variable, and there is now an abundance of data characterizing how the magnitude and structure of this ariability depends on the stimulus. Current theories of cortical computation fail to account for these data; they either ignore variability altogether or only model its unstructured Poisson-like aspects. We develop a […]
Roy A., Osik JJ., Ritter NJ., Wang S., Shaw JT., Fiser J. & Van Hooser SD. (2016) Optogenetic spatial and temporal control of cortical circuits on a columnar scale. Journal of neurophysiology 115 (2), 1043-1062
Many circuits in the mammalian brain are organized in a topographic or columnar manner. These circuits could be activated-in ways that reveal circuit function or restore function after disease-by an artificial stimulation system that is capable of independently driving local groups of neurons. Here we present a simple custom microscope called ProjectorScope 1 that incorporates […]
Karuza EA., Emberson LL., Roser ME., Cole D., Aslin RN. & Fiser J. (2017) Neural signatures of spatial statistical learning: characterizing the extraction of structure from complex visual scenes. Journal of cognitive neuroscience 29 (12), 1963-1976
Behavioral evidence has shown that humans automatically develop internal representations adapted to the temporal and spatial statistics of the environment. Building on prior fMRI studies that have focused on statistical learning of temporal sequences, we investigated the neural substrates and mechanisms underlying statistical learning from scenes with a structured spatial layout. Our goals were twofold: […]