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Poster C in Poster Session C: Wednesday, August 5, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Initial Organization of the Visual System Emerges from Structured Early Activity Before Naturalistic Experience

Seojin Lee¹, Kalanit Grill-Spector¹, Daniel LK Yamins¹; ¹Stanford University

Presenter: Seojin Lee

The visual system is already highly organized during the prenatal period, before the onset of naturalistic visual experience. Yet, what determines this initial state remains poorly understood. We test whether structured self-generated activity is sufficient to establish early visual organization by training deep neural networks on inputs with varying statistical structure and organizing them on a simulated cortical sheet. We evaluate candidate initial states in terms of functional utility, topographic organization, and wiring efficiency. We find that sufficiently structured inputs uniquely satisfy all three criteria, producing transferable representations, biologically plausible cortical maps, and efficient large-scale organization without exposure to natural images. These findings suggest that structured spontaneous activity may provide an initial scaffold for visual cortical organization prior to visual experience.

Topic Area: Computational Models of Vision & Visual Cortex