Fixational Transients

D. Galor, Jude F. Mitchell, Daniel A. Butts, Jacob L. Yates

Uncovering the role of eye movements as a primary driver of neuron activity in the visual cortex.
Demonstrate simple mechanisms that explain this activity only using a feed-forward model! (No recurrence/external motor signals.)
Propose a novel activation function SplitReLU, and show that CNNs using it exhibit emergent physiological selectivity throughout.
Break the traditionally used "upper bound" of explainable variance, showing its likely that fixational eye movements significantly drive activity in the visual cortex.
Show that large ResNets can match more interpretable models with little engineering, and compare between the two using interpretable ML.
State-of-the-art neural data from the marmoset primary visual cortex around the center of gaze (!) with spatiotemporal modeling at 240hz (!), during natural free-viewing (!), and using extremely high precision (sub-cone resolution!) DDPI eyetracking.

Full size file can be accessed here.