Back

Individual differences in prefrontal coding of visual features

Lin, Q.; Lau, H.

2025-02-20 neuroscience
10.1101/2024.05.09.588948 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Each of us perceives the world differently. What may underlie such individual differences in perception? Here, we characterize the lateral prefrontal cortexs role in vision using computational models, with a specific focus on individual differences. Using a 7T fMRI dataset, we found that encoding models relating visual features extracted from a deep neural network to brain responses to natural images robustly predict responses in patches of LPFC. We then explored the representational structures and screened for images with high predicted responses in LPFC. We observed more substantial individual differences in the coding schemes of LPFC compared to visual regions. Computational modeling suggests that the amplified individual differences could result from the random projection between sensory and high-level regions underlying flexible working memory. Our study demonstrates the under-appreciated role of LPFC in visual processing and suggests that LPFC may underlie the idiosyncrasies in how different individuals experience the visual world.

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.