News

James DiCarlo, associate professor of neuroscience, has been named head of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. His five-year term will begin March 1. DiCarlo succeeds Mriganka Sur, who will leave his position as department head to become the director of the Simons Center for the Social Brain at MIT, a new initiative that… Read more

America's finest news source, The Onion, featured "groundbreaking" research that was not conducted in the DiCarlo lab. According to the story published in March 2014, human beings display their highest range of cognitive capabilities when attempting to retrieve an object accidentally dropped into the narrow space between car seats. "If we could somehow harness the cognitive power on display in such… Read more

For decades, neuroscientists have been trying to design computer networks that can mimic visual skills such as recognizing objects, which the human brain does very accurately and quickly. Until now, no computer model has been able to match the primate brain at visual object recognition during a brief glance. However, a new study from MIT… Read more

How do primates, including humans, tell faces apart? Scientists have long attributed this ability to so-called “face-detector” (FD) neurons, thought to be responsible for distinguishing faces, among other objects. But no direct evidence has supported this claim. Now, using optogenetics, a technique that controls neural activity with light, MIT researchers have provided the first evidence… Read more

Using data from both humans and nonhuman primates, neuroscientists have found that neuron firing patterns in the IT cortex correlate strongly with success in object-recognition tasks. Read More.. Read more

For years, scientists have been trying to teach computers how to see like humans, and recent research has seemed to show computers making progress in recognizing visual objects. A new MIT study, however, cautions that this apparent success may be misleading because the tests being used are inadvertently stacked in favor of computers. Computer vision… Read more

The unifying theme of DiCarlo’s lab is to understand how we can recognize objects in the world using visual data – or how we are able to see. Read more.. Read more

James DiCarlo and his team help define goals for primate-like object recognition by artificial neural networks. Read More… Read more

AI researcher Jonas Kubilius of MIT hopes his work will help win over neuroscientists. At CCN, he and MIT Ph.D. student Martin Schrimpf presented Brain-Score, a method for judging whether image-classifying neural networks are good models for the brain. Read More… Read more

Lead author Rishi Rajalingham has conducted neural perturbation studies to control Inferotemporal cortex activity at a high spatial resolution by injecting a drug that completely silences all neural activity in a small targeted brain region. He found that silencing small regions of IT impaired the monkeys' abilities to discriminate between objects, demonstrating that IT is… Read more