Eckstein And Wang Use Ai Learning To Uncover Neural Mechanisms Of Covert Attention

PBS professor Miguel Eckstein, along with Computer Science Professor William Wang, have used artificial neural networks to re-create the behavioral signatures of covert attention–the process by which we shift our attention without necessarily shifting our eyes. In their newest work, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Eckstein, Wang, and PhD student Sudhanshu Srivastava have been now able to recover the detailed mechanisms of how the artificial neural nets (ANNs) actually produce the behavioral phenomena. Analyses of the ANNs uncovered new “neurons types” that the authors then showed to exist by re-analyzing mouse neuronal data. This work, in addition to uncovering novel neural mechanisms of attention, represents a new way to use AI as a model of how human cognition may work. For the full story see the UCSB Current article.