How does visual experience shape representations and transformations along the ventral stream?

Marina Bedny, Nancy Kanwisher, Olivier Collignon, Ilker Yildirim, Elizabeth Saccone, Apurva Ratan Murty, Stefania Mattioni

TL;DR: Scientific question: How does visual experience impact representations and transformations along the ventral stream? How broad is the human brain’s capacity to ‘retool’ in the face of ‘atypical’ experience?

Abstract:

Scientific question: A key puzzle in cognitive neuroscience concerns the contribution of innate
predispositions versus lifetime experience to cortical function. Addressing this puzzle has implications
that reach far, from plasticity of the neural hardware [1] to representations in the mind and their
developmental trajectory [2], and even to building artificially intelligent systems [3,4]. Yet, this is a
notoriously difficult topic to study empirically. We propose to tackle this issue in the context of the high-
level ‘visual’ representations through neural, behavioral, and computational studies of individuals who
are sighted and congenitally blind. Congenital blindness represents a uniquely tractable and rich model
to study how innate substrate and atypical experience interact to shape the functional tuning of the
brain. This work aspires to reveal the origins, including the representational and computational basis, of
high-level visual representations by addressing the following questions: How does visual experience
impact representations and transformations along the ventral stream? How broad is the human brain’s
capacity to ‘retool’ in the face of ‘atypical’ experience?