Biology subjects

Livingstone, M.

Publications and source records attributed to Livingstone, M..

6 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

A hierarchical computational motif unifies neural dynamics across the ventral visual stream

Neural representations within individual visual cortical areas are dynamic; they evolve over tens to hundreds of milliseconds, even in response to static images. These dynamics have typically been described as area-specific phenomena with unique computational signatures. Here, we show that representational dynamics across the ventral visual stream follow a common motif: representations within each area shift over time along the same complexity axis that organizes hierarchical visual areas. The spatiotemporal signatures of this shift indicate that it is broadly distributed across the neural population, rather than concentrated in specific subpopulations. These shifts are functionally consequential, allowing for the recognition of more complex images over the course of the response. Further, we show evidence in all visual areas of a 30 ms within-area predictivity signal whose properties are consistent with local recurrence, which may be driving the representational shifts. Yet, we show that current state-of-the-art dynamic models, including one with built-in local recurrent processing, fail to recapitulate the measured neural dynamics. Together, these results reveal a common temporal motif across the ventral hierarchy, suggest local recurrence as a possible driver, and provide a concrete dynamic target for future models of the ventral visual stream.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Mapping Macaque to Human Cortex with Natural Scene Responses

Neuroscience has long relied on macaque studies to infer human brain function, yet identifying functionally corresponding brain regions across species and measurement modalities remains a fundamental challenge. This is especially true for higher-order cortex, where functional interpretations are constrained by narrow hypotheses and anatomical landmarks are often non-homologous. We present a data-driven approach for mapping functional correspondence across species using rich, naturalistic stimuli. By directly comparing macaque electrophysiology with human fMRI responses to 700 natural scenes, we identify fine-grained alignment based on response pattern similarity, without relying on predefined tuning concepts or hand-picked stimuli. As a test case, we examine the ventral face patch system, a well-studied but contested domain in cross-species alignment. Our approach resolves a longstanding ambiguity, yielding a correspondence consistent with full-brain anatomical warping but inconsistent with prior studies limited by narrow functional hypotheses. These findings show that natural image-evoked response patterns provide a robust foundation for cross-species functional alignment, supporting scalable comparisons as large-scale primate recordings become more widespread.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Monkey See, Model Knew: Large Language Models Accurately Predict Visual Brain Responses in Humans and Non-Human Primates

AO_SCPLOWBSTRACTC_SCPLOWRecent progress in multimodal AI and language-aligned visual representation learning has rekindled debates about the role of language in shaping the human visual system. In particular, the emergent ability of language-aligned vision models (e.g. CLIP) - and even pure language models (e.g. BERT) - to predict image-evoked brain activity has led some to suggest that human visual cortex itself may be language-aligned in comparable ways. But what would we make of this claim if the same procedures could model visual activity in a species without language? Here, we conducted controlled comparisons of pure-vision, pure-language, and multimodal vision-language models in their prediction of human (N=4) and rhesus macaque (N=6, 5:IT, 1:V1) ventral visual activity to the same set of 1000 captioned natural images (the NSD1000). The results revealed markedly similar patterns in model predictivity of early and late ventral visual cortex across both species. This suggests that language model predictivity of the human visual system is not necessarily due to the evolution or learning of language perse, but rather to the statistical structure of the visual world that is reflected in natural language.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

The neural code for 'face cells' is not face specific

1 Face cells are visual neurons that respond more to faces than other objects. Clustered together in inferotemporal cortex, they are thought to carry out face processing specifically and are thus studied using faces almost exclusively. Analyzing neural responses in and around macaque face patches to hundreds of objects, we found graded response profiles for non-faces that were predictive of the degree of face selectivity and provided information on face-cell tuning that could not be characterized with actual faces. This relationship between non-face and face responses was not predicted by color and simple shape properties, but by information encoded in deep neural networks trained on general object classification rather than face identification. These findings contradict the long-standing assumption that face cells owe their category selectivity to face-specific features, instead providing evidence for the notion that category-selective neurons are best understood as tuning directions in an integrated, domain-general object space.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

Prospective cohort study reveals unexpected aetiologies of livestock abortion in northern Tanzania

Livestock abortion is an important cause of productivity losses worldwide and many infectious causes of abortion are zoonotic pathogens that impact on human health. Little is known about the relative importance of infectious causes of livestock abortion in Africa, including in subsistence farming communities that are critically dependent on livestock for food, income, and wellbeing. We conducted a prospective cohort study of livestock abortion, supported by cross-sectional serosurveillance, to determine aetiologies of livestock abortions in livestock in Tanzania. This approach generated several important findings including detection of a Rift Valley fever virus outbreak in cattle; high prevalence of C. burnetii infection in livestock; and the first report of Neospora caninum, Toxoplasma gondii, and pestiviruses associated with livestock abortion in Tanzania. Our approach provides a model for abortion surveillance in resource-limited settings. Our findings add substantially to current knowledge in sub-Saharan Africa, providing important evidence from which to prioritise disease interventions.

systems biology↗

bioRxiv2020

Sulcal depth in medial ventral temporal cortex predicts the location of a place-selective region in macaques, children, and adults.

The evolution and development of anatomical-functional relationships in the cerebral cortex is of major interest in neuroscience. Here, we leveraged the fact that a functional region selective for visual scenes is located within a sulcus in medial ventral temporal cortex (VTC) in both humans and macaques to examine the relationship between sulcal depth and place-selectivity in medial VTC across species and age groups. To do so, we acquired anatomical and functional magnetic resonance imaging scans in 9 macaques, 26 human children, and 28 human adults. Our results revealed a strong structural-functional coupling between sulcal depth and place-selectivity across age groups and species in which selectivity was strongest at the deepest sulcal point (the sulcal pit). Interestingly, this coupling between sulcal depth and place-selectivity strengthens from childhood to adulthood in humans. Morphological analyses suggest that the stabilization of sulcal-functional coupling in adulthood may be due to sulcal deepening and areal expansion with age as well as developmental differences in cortical curvature at the pial, but not the white matter surfaces. Our results implicate sulcal features as functional landmarks in high-level visual cortex and highlight that sulcal-functional relationships in medial VTC are preserved between macaques and humans despite differences in cortical folding.

neuroscience↗