WashU assistant professor of neuroscience Tom Franken, PhD and professor of physics Ralf Wessel, PhD have secured a $427,625 grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how artificial neural networks and primate brains process and predict video imagery.
In doing so, they’ll draw novel connections between how artificial and biological brains analyze visual information, starting from the basic tasks of differentiating objects in a scene.
The key concept at play in these studies is “border ownership,” a visual process that aids in distinguishing foreground objects from background to help determine an object’s shape. Several famous optical illusions play with our sense of border ownership, including Rubin’s vase, which appears to depict the silhouette of a vase… or a pair of faces, depending on how one determines the image’s foreground versus its background.
