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Cortical mechanisms of action selection: the affordance competition hypothesis.

ABSTRACT: At every moment, the natural world presents animals with two fundamental pragmatic problems: selection between actions that are currently possible and specification of the parameters or metrics of those actions. It is commonly suggested that the brain addresses these by first constructing representations of the world on which to build knowledge and make a decision, and then by computing and executing an action plan. However, neurophysiological data argue against this serial viewpoint. In contrast, it is proposed here that the brain processes sensory information to specify, in parallel, several potential actions that are currently available. These potential actions compete against each other for further processing, while information is collected to bias this competition until a single response is selected. The hypothesis suggests that the dorsal visual system specifies actions which compete against each other within the fronto-parietal cortex, while a variety of biasing influences are provided by prefrontal regions and the basal ganglia. A computational model is described, which illustrates how this competition may take place in the cerebral cortex. Simulations of the model capture qualitative features of neurophysiological data and reproduce various behavioural phenomena.

SUBMITTER: Cisek P

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2440773 | biostudies-literature | 2007 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Cortical mechanisms of action selection: the affordance competition hypothesis.

Cisek Paul P

Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences 20070901 1485

At every moment, the natural world presents animals with two fundamental pragmatic problems: selection between actions that are currently possible and specification of the parameters or metrics of those actions. It is commonly suggested that the brain addresses these by first constructing representations of the world on which to build knowledge and make a decision, and then by computing and executing an action plan. However, neurophysiological data argue against this serial viewpoint. In contras ...[more]

PMID: 17428779

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Project description:Biologically inspired deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), trained for computer vision tasks, have been found to predict cortical responses with remarkable accuracy. However, the internal operations of these models remain poorly understood, and the factors that account for their success are unknown. Here we develop a set of techniques for using CNNs to gain insights into the computational mechanisms underlying cortical responses. We focused on responses in the occipital place area (OPA), a scene-selective region of dorsal occipitoparietal cortex. In a previous study, we showed that fMRI activation patterns in the OPA contain information about the navigational affordances of scenes; that is, information about where one can and cannot move within the immediate environment. We hypothesized that this affordance information could be extracted using a set of purely feedforward computations. To test this idea, we examined a deep CNN with a feedforward architecture that had been previously trained for scene classification. We found that responses in the CNN to scene images were highly predictive of fMRI responses in the OPA. Moreover the CNN accounted for the portion of OPA variance relating to the navigational affordances of scenes. The CNN could thus serve as an image-computable candidate model of affordance-related responses in the OPA. We then ran a series of in silico experiments on this model to gain insights into its internal operations. These analyses showed that the computation of affordance-related features relied heavily on visual information at high-spatial frequencies and cardinal orientations, both of which have previously been identified as low-level stimulus preferences of scene-selective visual cortex. These computations also exhibited a strong preference for information in the lower visual field, which is consistent with known retinotopic biases in the OPA. Visualizations of feature selectivity within the CNN suggested that affordance-based responses encoded features that define the layout of the spatial environment, such as boundary-defining junctions and large extended surfaces. Together, these results map the sensory functions of the OPA onto a fully quantitative model that provides insights into its visual computations. More broadly, they advance integrative techniques for understanding visual cortex across multiple level of analysis: from the identification of cortical sensory functions to the modeling of their underlying algorithms.

Project description:Stimulus position is coded even if it is task-irrelevant, leading to faster response times when the stimulus and the response locations are compatible (spatial Stimulus-Response Compatibility-spatial SRC). Faster responses are also found when the handle of a visual object and the response hand are located on the same side; this is known as affordance effect (AE). Two contrasting accounts for AE have been classically proposed. One is focused on the recruitment of appropriate grasping actions on the object handle, and the other on the asymmetry in the object shape, which in turn would cause a handle-hand correspondence effect (CE). In order to disentangle these two accounts, we investigated the possible transfer of practice in a spatial SRC task executed with a S-R incompatible mapping to a subsequent affordance task in which objects with either their intact handle or a broken one were used. The idea was that using objects with broken handles should prevent the recruitment of motor information relative to object grasping, whereas practice transfer should prevent object asymmetry in driving handle-hand CE. A total of three experiments were carried out. In Experiment 1 participants underwent an affordance task in which common graspable objects with their intact or broken handle were used. In Experiments 2 and 3, the affordance task was preceded by a spatial SRC task in which an incompatible S-R mapping was used. Inter-task delays of 5 or 30 min were employed to assess the duration of transfer effect. In Experiment 2 objects with their intact handle were presented, whereas in Experiment 3 the same objects had their handle broken. Although objects with intact and broken handles elicited a handle-hand CE in Experiment 1, practice transfer from an incompatible spatial SRC to the affordance task was found in Experiment 3 (broken-handle objects), but not in Experiment 2 (intact-handle objects). Overall, this pattern of results indicate that both object asymmetry and the activation of motor information contribute to the generation of the handle-hand CE effect, and that the handle AE cannot be reduced to a SRC effect.

Dataset Information

Cortical mechanisms of action selection: the affordance competition hypothesis.

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Cortical mechanisms of action selection: the affordance competition hypothesis.

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