Related Experiment Video
Updated: Mar 28, 2026

Monocular Visual Deprivation and Ocular Dominance Plasticity Measurement in the Mouse Primary Visual Cortex
Published on: February 8, 2020
During natural vision, semantic novelty modulates fixation-related processing in primate cortex
Vinay S Raghavan1, Jens Madsen1, Maximilian Nentwich2
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, The City College of New York, New York, NY, USA.
Abstract:
We sample visual scenes with short gaze fixations separated by saccades. While low-level integration is known, semantic integration of foveal vision across multiple fixations remains unclear. We hypothesized that the brain responds to changes in semantic information from one fixation to the next, and therefore postulated a neural signal associated with semantic novelty for each saccade. Novelty was measured using a deep network on foveal vision. Novelty modulated frontal and occipital fixation-related potentials in human EEG during natural viewing of full-length movies (3.4x106 saccades). Intracranial recordings in humans (9.0x104 saccades) and non-human primates (3.3x104 saccades) revealed broadband high-frequency activity modulations in ventromedial visual and frontal brain areas. This modulation was stronger for movies than static images, and frontal modulation preceded occipital modulation, suggesting top-down effects. This modulation of fixation-related activity with novelty suggests that foveal representations are integrated across saccades to construct scene representations during natural viewing in primates.
Related Concept Videos
Visual System
Once through the pupil, the light passes through the lens, a...
Vision
Photoreceptors and Visual Pathways

