Neuroscience Institute researchers use AI to model brain’s image sense.

Maggie Henderson’s team at Carnegie Mellon University’s Neuroscience Institute is collecting functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to build models predicting how the human visual cortex responds to images. For decades, neuroscience and artificial intelligence have separately pursued the question of how intelligence emerges; now, advances in both fields are enabling a collaborative approach. Henderson studies how the brain transforms complex perceptual input into meaningful representations of objects and scenes, noting that “for years, that was a difficult challenge.” This interdisciplinary work aims to understand intelligence, both biological and artificial, and open new avenues for innovation in both fields. Advances in artificial intelligence are now allowing researchers to predict activity within the human visual cortex with increasing accuracy, offering insight into how the brain interprets images. This approach moves beyond simply observing brain activity to proactively forecasting how specific areas will react to different visual inputs. Deep neural networks, initially developed for computer vision tasks, have proven instrumental in bridging this gap; the internal…