Jacob Yates (UC Berkeley), “The Role of Motor Signals in Visual Cortex”

Embodiment is fundamental to biological intelligence. Brains do not passively receive the world, they actively shape what they sense through self-motion. For nearly a century, we have known that perception and action are deeply entangled, and that organisms must constantly infer whether a sensory change comes from the environment or from themselves. A longstanding idea holds that sensory signals are either suppressed during movement or that movement effects are subtracted out. However, recent discoveries in neuroscience, especially in rodents, suggest that spontaneous movements strongly influence sensory cortex. In this talk, I will share our work re-examining this question in primates. We found that movements do not broadly modulate visual cortex unless they move the retina, creating an inherent ambiguity between motor effects and changes in sensory input. I will describe our new approach to disentangling sensorimotor interactions during natural behavior, combining high-resolution eye tracking with high-density neural recordings and modern machine learning. By precisely measuring the retinal input during natural vision, we find that much of what appears to be a motor signal is actually visual reafference, the lawful, structured sensory consequences of an animal’s own actions. I will discuss how measuring and modeling this loop can deepen our understanding of active inference in the brain and what it means for designing truly embodied agents that adapt to the world as brains do.

Bio

Jacob Yates (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Optometry & Vision Science at UC Berkeley and leads the Active Vision and Neural Computation Lab. His research explores how populations of neurons in the cortex and early visual pathways encode the visual world, with a particular focus on how eye movements generate and utilize information for perception. By combining statistical and machine learning approaches, his lab builds computational models to better understand neural activity and human perception, ultimately aiming to bridge the gap between neural coding and real-world visual behavior.

This talk is part of Aravind Battaje‘s course “Mind, Body, Environment: An Interactive Seminar on Embodied Intelligence,” a seminar introducing to key theories and research highlighting this shift in perspective through invited lectures from experts in the field and interactive sessions.

Photo by Soliman Cifuentes on Unsplash.