Visual attention neuroprosthesis in marmoset to elucidate midbrain mechanisms of bottom-up attention

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This year, primary achievements were analysis of free viewing gaze data from control subjects and from human infants (a model with less top-down input), implementation of better predictive models for replacing missing visual cortex activity, and design and planning of the superior colliculus silicon probe implantations. Interestingly, infants past 12 months do not appear to have different looking patterns than marmosets, in contrast to our predictions (and thus using 12 month old infants as a null model against marmosets for comparison is tenable).On the modeling side, I implemented foveation and gaze-centered versions of the target prediction (i.e. saliency map) models. This took longer than expected due to underestimation of their difficulty for real-time implementation. These are available freely on github.Finally, to enable better throughput and administration of data, I implemented a pipeline to analyze gaze data and saliency (including saccade and other eye movement detections) which uses relational databases instead of the previous distributed file format, to save space and computation. I submitted a large review paper as well as several other original papers regarding the infant data as well as free viewing data from marmoset.