Neural Circuits for Pattern Completion

The ability to extrapolate and make inferences from partial information is a central component of intelligence and manifests itself in all cognitive domains including language, vision, planning, and learning. This project aims to elucidate the computational mechanisms responsible for pattern completion by combining neurophysiological recordings, behavioral measurements and theoretical modeling. We focus on the problem of visual object completion, which is essential for the Center’s challenge of “What/Who is there?”. This effort is focusing on:

(i) characterizing the behavioral ability to perform visual object completion (including speed, dependence on amount and type of occluders, effects of masking),

(ii) interrogating the neural circuits along the ventral visual stream during object completion and

(iii) building a biologically plausible model that includes both bottom-up and recurrent connections and is capable of achieving human performance in object completion