Cheapmonkey: Comparing an ANN and the Primate Brain on a Simple Perceptual Task: Orientation Discrimination

Abstract

For a number of years our laboratory has been involved in the study of the neuronal mechanisms underlying simple discriminations such as speed or orientation discriminations made by humans (Orban et al. 1984a, b) and model species such as cats (Vandenbussche et al. 1986b) and monkeys (Vandenbussche et al. 1986a; Vogels et al. 1988). The reason for studying these simple perceptual tasks is to reduce the complexity of the study by having an extremely complex brain performing a relatively simple operation, which we hope to understand with the presently available neuroscience techniques. As such these studies are an alternative to neuroscience studies of the behaviour of invertebrates (Kandel 1976). One approach has been to record from different structures along the visual pathways while monkeys perform the discrimination. We (Vogels et al. 1989, Vogels and Orban 1989, Orban and Vogels 1989) have recently finished such a study of monkey striate neurons recorded while the monkey was performing an orientation discrimination task. We have used the orientation tuning curves obtained in that study as characteristics of input units of a multilayer perceptron trained with backpropagation and performing an orientation discrimination task similar to that of the monkeys.