Roy A., Christie IK., Escobar GM., Osik JJ., Popovic M., Ritter NJ., Stacy AK., Wang S., Fiser J., Miller P. & Van Hooser SD. (2018) Does experience provide a permissive or instructive influence on the development of direction selectivity in visual cortex? Neural development 13 (1), 16
In principle, the development of sensory receptive fields in cortex could arise from experience-independent mechanisms that have been acquired through evolution, or through an online analysis of the sensory experience of the individual animal. Here we review recent experiments that suggest that the development of direction selectivity in carnivore visual cortex requires experience, but also […]
Rosa-Salva O., Fiser J., Versace E., Dolci C., Chehaimi S., Santolin C. & Vallortigara G. (2018) Spontaneous learning of visual structures in domestic chicks. Animals 8 (8), 135
Effective communication crucially depends on the ability to produce and recognize structured signals, as apparent in language and birdsong. Although it is not clear to what extent similar syntactic-like abilities can be identified in other animals, recently we reported that domesticchicks can learn abstract visual patterns and the statistical structure defined by a temporal sequence […]
Popovic M., Stacy AK., Kang M., Nanu R., Oettgen CE., Wise DL., Fiser J. & Van Hooser SD. (2018) Development of cross-orientation suppression and size tuning and the role of experience. Journal of Neuroscience, 2886-17
Many sensory neural circuits exhibit response normalization, which occurs when the response of a neuron to a combination of multiple stimuli is less than the sum of the responses to the individual stimuli presented alone. In the visual cortex, normalization takes the forms of cross-orientation suppression and surround suppression. At the onset of visual experience, […]
Fiser J. & Lengyel G. (2019) A common probabilistic framework for perceptual and statistical learning. Current opinion in neurobiology 58, 218-228
System-level learning of sensory information is traditionally divided into two domains: perceptual learning that focuses on acquiring knowledge suitable for fine discrimination between similar sensory inputs, and statistical learning that explores the mechanisms that develop complex representations of unfamiliar sensory experiences. The two domains have been typically treated in complete separation both in terms of […]
Lengyel G., Zalalyte G., Pantelides A., Ingram JN., Fiser J., Lengyel M. & Wolpert DM. (2019) Unimodal statistical learning produces multimodal object-like representations. eLife 2019;8:e43942
The concept of objects is fundamental to cognition and is defined by a consistent set of sensory properties and physical affordances. Although it is unknown how the abstract concept of an object emerges, most accounts assume that visual or haptic boundaries are crucial in this process. Here, we tested an alternative hypothesis that boundaries are […]
Lengyel G. & Fiser J. (2019) The relationship between initial threshold, learning, and generalization in perceptual learning. Journal of Vision 19 (4), 28
We investigated the origin of two previously reported general rules of perceptual learning. First, the initial discrimination thresholds and the amount of learning were found to be related through a Weber-like law. Second, increased training length negatively influenced the observer’s ability to generalize the obtained knowledge to a new context. Using a five-day training protocol, […]
Christensen JH., Bex PJ. & Fiser J. (2019) Coding of low-level position and orientation information in human naturalistic vision. PLoS ONE 14(2): e0212141
Orientation and position of small image segments are considered to be two fundamental low-level attributes in early visual processing, yet their encoding in complex natural stimuli is underexplored. By measuring the just-noticeable differences in noise perturbation, we investigated how orientation and position information of a large number of local elements (Gabors) were encoded separately or […]
Arató J., Rothkopf C. A. & Fiser J. (2020) Learning in the eyes: specific changes in gaze patterns track explicit and implicit visual learning. bioRxiv 2020.08.03.234039
What is the link between eye movements and sensory learning? Although some theories have argued for a permanent and automatic interaction between what we know and where we look, which continuously modulates human information- gathering behavior during both implicit and explicit learning, there exist surprisingly little evidence supporting such an ongoing interaction. We used a […]
Avarguès-Weber A., Finke V., Nagy M., Szabó T., d’Amaro D., Dyer A.G. & Fiser J (2020) Different mechanisms underlie implicit visual statistical learning in honey bees and humans. PNAS 117 (41) 25923-25934
The ability of developing complex internal representations of the environment is considered a crucial antecedent to the emergence of humans’ higher cognitive functions. Yet it is an open question whether there is any fundamental difference in how humans and other good visual learner species naturally encode aspects of novel visual scenes. Using the same modified […]
Lengyel G., Nagy M., & Fiser J. (2021) Statistically defined visual chunks engage object-based attention. Nature communications 12 (1), pp. 1-12
Although objects are the fundamental units of our representation interpreting the environment around us, it is still not clear how we handle and organize the incoming sensory information to form object representations. By utilizing previously well-documented advantages of within-object over across-object information processing, here we test whether learning involuntarily consistent visual statistical properties of stimuli […]