SL-CN: Mapping, Measuring, and Modeling Perceptual Expertise

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This Science of Learning Collaborative Network brings together researchers from Vanderbilt University, Carnegie-Mellon University, and University of California-San Diego to investigate how and why people differ in their ability to recognize, remember, and categorize faces and objects. Many important real-world problems, such as forensics, medical imaging, and homeland security demand precise visual understanding from human experts. Understanding individual differences in high-level visual cognition has received little attention compared to other aspects of human performance. Recent studies indicate that there likely is far greater variability than commonly acknowledged in the ability to learn high-level visual skills and that such ability is poorly predicted by general intelligence. This project supports a collaborative interdisciplinary research network that aims to develop measures of individual differences in visual recognition, relate behavioral and neural markers of individual differences, develop models that explain individual differences, and relate models with neural data. Because outcomes in many real-world domains depend on decisions based on visual information, developing measures, markers, and models of individual differences can have broader impacts on identifying real-world visual talent and improving visual performance and training. Students and fellows conducting research as part of this collaborative network, including female scientists and underrepresented minorities, will be mentored by scientists from multiple disciplines, providing them with an understanding far deeper than that achievable by a single discipline.The project will support the activities of a collaborative research network on the study of individual differences in visual recognition. The scientists involved in these interdisciplinary efforts include experts in brain imaging at ultra-high field strength, cutting-edge methods in the development of psychological tests, and cognitive and "deep" convolutional neural network models of high-level vision. The project will investigate how functional brain activity and anatomical brain structure can predict the quality and time-course of visual performance and visual learning. The team will develop and validate tests of visual ability that can be used to make precise predictions about brain activity and behavioral performance. These brain measures and behavioral tests will be related to deep convolutional neural network models; such models are the most successful computer vision models to date, and higher layers of these hierarchical networks provide outstanding models of brain areas critical to object recognition. So far these models have not been used to understand individual differences. Instead of the typical approach seeking to achieve the best performance possible, the collaborative team will seek models that can mirror human variability, making errors when people make errors, being slow when people are slow, and displaying a range of visual abilities and learning as observed in humans.The award is from the Science of Learning-Collaborative Networks (SL-CN) Program, with funding from the SBE Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (BCS), the SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (SMA), and the CISE Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS).