Fixational Transients

• 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.