- NEW DELHI — A Columbia University’s School of Engineering study in the US has
shown that the brain’s visual regions play an active role in making sense of
information, which could help build more adaptive AI systems.
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- Crucially, the way it interprets the information depends on
what the rest of the brain is working on.
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- Published in the journal Nature Communications, the study
led by biomedical engineer and neuroscientist Nuttida Rungratsameetaweemana,
provides some of the clearest evidence yet that early sensory systems play a
role in decision-making — and that they adapt in real-time.
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- It also points to new approaches for designing AI systems
that can adapt to new or unexpected situations.
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- The findings challenge the traditional view that early
sensory areas in the brain are simply “looking” or “recording” visual input. In
fact, the human brain’s visual system actively reshapes how it represents the
exact same object depending on what you’re trying to do.
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- Even in visual areas that are very close to raw information
that enters the eyes, the brain has the flexibility to tune its interpretation
and responses based on the current task.
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- “It gives us a new way to think about flexibility in the
brain and opens up ideas for how to potentially build more adaptive AI systems
modelled after these neural strategies,” said Nuttida.
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- Most previous work looked at how people learn categories
over time, but this study zooms in on the flexibility piece: How does the brain
rapidly switch between different ways of organising the same visual
information?
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- The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
to observe people’s brain activity while they put shapes in different
categories. The twist was that the “rules” for categorising the shapes kept
changing.
