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 […]
Weliky M., Fiser J., Hunt RH. & Wagner DN. (2003) Coding of natural scenes in primary visual cortex. Neuron 37 (4), 703-718
Natural scene coding in ferret visual cortex was investigated using a new technique for multi-site recording of neuronal activity from the cortical surface. Surface recordings accurately reflected radially aligned layer 2/3 activity. At individual sites, evoked activity to natural scenes was weakly correlated with the local image contrast structure falling within the cells’ classical receptive […]
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 […]
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 […]
Fiser J. & Aslin RN. (2002) Statistical learning of new visual feature combinations by infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99 (24), 15822-15826
The ability of humans to recognize a nearly unlimited number of unique visual objects must be based on a robust and efficient learning mechanism that extracts complex visual features from the environment. To determine whether statistically optimal representations of scenes are formed during early development, we used a habituation paradigm with 9-month-old infants and found […]
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, […]
White B., Abbott LF. & Fiser J. (2012) Suppression of cortical neural variability is stimulus-and state-dependent. Journal of neurophysiology 108 (9), 2383-2392
Internally generated, spontaneous activity is ubiquitous in the cortex, yet it does not appear to have a significant negative impact on sensory processing. Various studies have found that stimulus onset reduces the variability of cortical responses, but the characteristics of this sup- pression remained unexplored. By recording multiunit activity from awake and anesthetized rats, we […]
Fiser J. & Aslin RN. (2002) Statistical learning of higher-order temporal structure from visual shape sequences.. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 28 (3), 458
In 3 experiments, the authors investigated the ability of observers to extract the probabilities of successive shape co-occurrences during passive viewing. Participants became sensitive to several temporal-order statistics, both rapidly and with no overt task or explicit instructions. Sequences of shapes presented during familiarization were distinguished from novel sequences of familiar shapes, as well as […]
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 […]
Berkes P., Orbán G., Lengyel M. & Fiser J. (2011) Spontaneous cortical activity reveals hallmarks of an optimal internal model of the environment. Science 331 (6013), 83-87 [Highly Cited Paper]
The brain maintains internal models of its environment to interpret sensory inputs and to prepare actions. Although behavioral studies have demonstrated that these internal models are optimally adapted to the statistics of the environment, the neural underpinning of this adaptation is unknown. Using a Bayesian model of sensory cortical processing, we related stimulus-evoked and spontaneous […]